Tracy has moved in. She helped me move Mom's furniture out of the back bedroom, and helped me move what furniture she wanted in from the garage. That's a lot for a tenant to do, especially when she is paying me. If she hadn't helped me, I would probably have had to pay Mom's repairman, because none of my neighbors were home.
A local reporter from the Peoria Journal Star newspaper has printed a column that deserves national attention. His name is Rick Baker and here is his column. **" For all you jobless folks out there who've exhausted your unemployment benefits, are losing your homes, your cars, your families and your sanity, here is some news: you don't exist. Non-existence probably beats the hell out of your real life right now, so, congratulations. The government is playing games with numbers to it's own advantage. Bureaucrats juggle statistics creating a mirage that makes politicians look more effective than they are. You can be out of work and starving to death, but according to the official numbers, you're fine. Unemployment statistics in the Peoria area, and just about everywhere else, are about as accurate as Janet Cooke's Pulitzer Prize-winning story about an adolescent drug addict, and are bandied about as little more than a political tool by solons trying to assure the public they're doing a great job. Thousands of jobless Peoria men and women are not included in the area's jobless rate because they've run out of unemployment benefits, can't collect any more from the government, and are therefore not counted as out of work even though most are more desperate than ever. A generally naive press takes the figures the government hands out as gospel, prints them in the newspaper, hollers them over radio and television, and while every other house on your block is for sale and every other former breadwinner watches soap operas, you're made to believe the overall picture is dandy. But it ain't! The twelve and one-half percent generally given for the Greater Peoria area is little more than a number reflecting the government's ability or unwillingness to face reality. A more accurate figure is probably somewhere around eighteen to twenty percent, and that doesn't reflect the plight of the area's underemployed, folks who've taken much lower paying jobs in an effort to meet the barest of necessities. The government wants the massive unemployment problem to go away, so they create a mirage making it go away, a local expert said. And during an election year like this, they play all sorts of games. Figures lie and liars figure. And as a result of the numbers game, the official unemployment rate is expected to continue to decrease even though the number of actual jobless will probably stay about the same. One of the reasons for the decrease (very handy in an election year) is the reduced time folks laid-off in 1982 from Caterpillar are eligible for unemployment benefits. Those laid-off in 1982 were eligible for a maximum of about two years of weekly unemployment payments. But the hundreds laid-off in the summer of 1983 get less than a year of such benefits because of cutbacks in the unemployment payment program. These folks will soon be disappearing from the unemployment rolls in droves. They still won't have jobs. They just won't, in the government's eyes, be counted as unemployed. And come November, newspapers and the broadcast media, along with every politician seeking re-election, will be screaming about the dramatic cutback in the unemployment rate. Another game initiated last year in an effort to make the federal government look real efficient in shaping up the economy is the addition of the military to the overall unemployment pot. Never before had the military been considered a part of the national work force. But in an effort to shave some points off the unemployment stats, the feds began counting the massive military rolls among those employed by the free enterprise system. That's bogus. But the strategy is working. The press buys the statistics, the people believe the press, and the people are left deceived. And another game meant to appease unemployed people is a federal invention known as a jobs training program, which is a creation of a sort of corporate welfare state. Under that program, the federal government will pay an employer up to three-fourths of the wage earned by a person hired from the program. So, if an employer agrees to pay a worker $4.00 an hour, the government will pay up to $3.00 of that. Even in the face of such sweet deals, area employers just don't have that many jobs to offer. Locally, 2,000 to 4,000 people have signed up for the jobs program, and less than one-percent of them will probably get any type of full-time permanent work as a result. But the federal government is doing all it can to employ more bureaucrats. To oversee the rather impotent jobs program, the government has designated four administrators, four staffs, and four offices in four different locations within a twenty mile radius. But the bureaucrats count (and badly). You don't"
I'll have another tenant move into the middle bedroom tomorrow. His name is Cecil, and he seems decent enough. He is on government disability financial assistance , the same as my ex-high school classmate, who thought about renting here. As he left today he said that he would help me fix my back door.
**Republished from the Peoria Journal Star newspaper with the permission of Terry Baker, widow of Rick Baker.
This is the letter I sent 3/19/o7:
Dear Ms Baker,
Your don't know me from Adam, and I don't know you either, nor your deceased husband.
Why I'm writing and what I want:
I lived in the Peoria area for years and didn't leave the area until 1987. For some crazy reason in 1984, I started and kept a diary/journal/book for the entire year. It is about what happened to my area and my neighborhood. During that time, your deceased husband wrote a column in the Peoria Journal Star that I copied verbatim, because it explained so eloquently what I was seeing with my own eyes in my town. It's been 23 years now, and I've decided to record it for posterity in book form.
I know that I can copy about 400 words of his column verbatim, but I would like to include the entire column, about 700 words, and credit your deceased husband. I know I can chop it up, insert about 400 of his words and butcher the gist of the rest of the column myself, but from my point of view, I couldn't begin to do it justice. I would like written permission to include the entire column.
I don't know if my book will sell one copy, but from a historical viewpoint, it might be of some interest to historians someday. I want it on record, not pitched in the garbage by one of my grandchildren after I'm gone.
I had no idea your husband was deceased until I started looking on the internet for contact information. I'm sorry. When you get to my age, a lot of friends, loves, etc. are gone, and I can empathize.
Whatever you decide, I wish you the best and hope you have made the most of your years. I am enclosing a SASE and will be waiting for your reply.
Best Wishes, Carole Steinbach
P.S. I hope I never see hunger in the United States again, as I saw it in the early 80's in Illinois.
Received from Terry Baker 3/31/07
23 March 2007
Carole,
I don't know which column you need. As far as I'm concerned, use whatever you want from it as long as you credit Rick and the paper.
Terry
