Marketplace, the public radio program that makes economics fun and easy to follow, reached out to RI Future yesterday. They are doing a piece – for tonight’s show, I believe – on layoffs at local unemployment offices and wanted to talk with our contributor, Jonathan Jacobs, who has been filing stories for us on losing his job at DLT. Marketplace is on RIPR tonight at 6:30.
Staff cuts at the state unemployment office may not matter to most of us, but to many of Rhode Island’s most unlucky residents (the ones who were laid off during the down economy) efficient unemployment insurance payments can make the difference between being foreclosed or not. Here are the stories Jonathan Jacobs has filed for RI Future on the situation.
Also, just in case you missed it, Aaron Regunberg has also been covering the unemployment crisis in Rhode Island. Every week he profiles a local person who is out of work (here’s a list of all his stories on the crisis). The idea is to show that unemployment is more than just a a quarterly percentage sent out by the state to compare our woes with Michigan and Nevada. There are real Rhode Islanders whose lives are being severely scarred by this crisis.
And speaking of unemployment, the Projo reports that WPA plaques are disappearing from sites where the government put people to work building up the commons and our shared infrastructure that we still use to get to the office and other places today … maybe trickle-down Republicans are taking them hoping we won’t remember what got the country out of the last big economic downturn?
Here’s hoping employees of Citizens Bank don’t have to join them on the unemployment line as a result of RBS’ issues. Either way, it’s high time we start talking about relocalizing banks.
All this talk about the economy has taken the focus away from climate change – something humanity can little afford to do, GoLocal’s Rob Horowitz reminds us this morning.
Awesome sentence about the Navy testing unmanned military drones in Narragansett Bay: “The bay known as a playground for the rich is the testing ground for the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, where the Navy is working toward its goal of achieving a squadron of self-driven, undersea vehicles.”
Speaking of completely unnecessary military endeavors … today in 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, “giving President Lyndon B. Johnson nearly unlimited powers to oppose “communist aggression” in Southeast Asia.”
I love the irony in Fox News seeming to care more that US Olympic uniforms look American than they do that they actually be American.