I recognize that many of our members are unemployed through no fault of their own and trying to help make ends meet by mystery shopping. And even where that is not the individual's specific situation, we all know family members or friends who are having a tough time finding jobs because there just are none out there.

Meanwhile Congress is playing games with the situation of the unemployed. The Unemployment extension bill again failed in the Senate today. True, it is loaded with pork and shame on those who put the pork there. Is it REALLY in the best interests of their constituents? 1.3 million unemployed have lost their benefits since the last extension of unemployment expired at the end of May, 1.63 million unemployed will lose their benefits by the end of this week and another 140,000 will lose their COBRA benefits.

This is the first time since the 1950's that unemployment extensions have been allowed to expire when the national level of unemployment is more than 7.2 percent. Always in the past Congress has been able to rise above partisan politics and put the interests of the people first.

We know this is hugely expensive, we know that there will be some cheats in the system. But the bottom line is that for those barely hanging on by a thread until things get better, Congressional bickering has cut that thread.

The matter will be brought up again on July 14th after they all go home for recess.

Please read as much as you can, find out how your Congressional representatives have been voting on this issue and ask yourself if they really deserve to be returned to office in the November elections. I will keep my personal political views out of this because I see garbage behavior on both sides of the aisle--which is why you really need to explore what YOUR representatives are doing. I'm frankly disgusted enough I think it is time to send about 75% of them to unemployment themselves!

Flash Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> ...I think
> it is time to send about 75% of them to
> unemployment themselves!


If only. One vote. One dream.

Let your representatives know how you feel and how you may vote when their seat is up. Maybe if the know they will be unemployed they will think about the consequences.

I do this all the time. But it only sometimes helps. :-(

And unfortunately since generally special interests are behind the pork in bills such as the unemployment one, one comes back to the old saw that, "We have the best government money can buy." This really is why I mentioned the failed legislation here. While the pork may have served the interests of some, the bill failing to pass will impact a large majority of the 9.5% of the work force that it still unemployed (those were the numbers released today). And of course the real numbers are larger than that because of underemployment, lowered hourly wages (a lot of places have done 5% across the board wage cuts and eliminated benefits to survive while working with a reduced work force as well) and people who have just stopped looking and thus have fallen out of the statistics.