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it seems that the entire question is pitched in the wrong direction here.
in general, increased unemployment is a function of concentration within some sectors made possible by a previous re-organization of production on transnational lines.
the dynamic behind that is the total abandonment of any sense that government has a meaningful role to play in shaping economic activity, a fiasco brought to you by neoliberalism, your favorite fantasy construct that replaces a rational assessment of capitalism entirely because it repeats well on ideological relays like faux news.
what's astonishing in the contemporary period is the extent and depth of the ideological inertia that we're seeing all around us. you'd think that the past year (well 30 if you thought about it, but hey why bother with that?) would have pulverized neoliberalism entirely--it revealed many (not all) of the systemic dysfunctions that neoliberalism enabled. but folk are still thinking more or less in the same terms as they try to figure a way through the wreckage created by it. it's crazy...but maybe it is after all just an indication of collapsing empire, that kind of total denial that seems historical characteristic of that period of collapse.
the administration *could* do any number of things to encourage different outcomes, but they'd have to go well beyond an idea of a green economy to really take hold.
not that i do not support such initiatives--i do. but i think they're too narrow, particularly if they remain just two words that you put together to make yourself think that maybe something different is possible somehow and does not become a centerpiece for actual policy.
for example, when the obama administration came into power, there was alot of talk about microcredit as a cornerstone of development policy both domestic and overseas.
that seems to have gone away.
but if unemployment is an actual problem--and you'd think it would be understood that way (that it isn't is just another example of the happyplace at the center of neoliberal fictions about the world)---then redirecting actual resources away from, say, massive military expenditures into micro-credit programs that would enable lots of new smaller business to get started that would employ folk...maybe something like that would be a good idea.
i will say though that i do not envy the position that obama's administration has been placed in by the epic fuck up that was the bush period. i see them as largely boxed in by it. which is a shame. but there we are.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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