Business

Originally posted at Citizen Orange.

The fate of almost a million lives could be decided in the next six hours.  As a voter, as a millenial, as a migrant, as a Guatemalan, I'm writing to say that I will be watching along with the vast majority of those who will determine the future of the United States of America. 

If you already haven't heard already, Harry Reid is going to offer the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act up as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act.  The Senate is scheduled to vote on taking up the Act tomorrow at 2:15 p.m.  If you haven't called you're Senator yet in the support of the DREAM Act please do so now by calling:

It is imperative that you focus on these Senators.  If you've called already, call again.  If you've called again, ask five friends to do the same.  If you've done all that, here are some more actions you can take.

If you haven't heard about the DREAM Act yet I wouldn't be surprised.  The media has largely been focused on the train wreck that is Christine O'Donnell's campaign.  But the mainstream media is missing out on one of the most suspenseful political dramas I've ever witnessed.  No one knows if we have the votes to beat the filibuster in the Senate, today.  If we don't beat it, the National Defense Authorization Act will likely have to wait until after the elections.  At that point, all bets are off. 

One of the most compelling elements of this political drama has been the interaction between The LGBT movement and the migrant youth movement.  What to an outsider might be perceived as two unrelated constituencies, perhaps even hostile to each other, have been working long before this moment to build unity and solidarity.  It is one thing to believe in the truth that we are all woven into a "single garment of destiny."  It is another to live that truth and act on it.  The migrant youth movement and the LGBT movement having been living and acting on that truth, as we all should.  My freedom is tied up with the freedom of everyone else in the universe, and tomorrow we have a chance to set close to a million people free. 

Again, the media hasn't been watching but everyone who matters everyone who will decide the future of this country is watching.  The DREAM Act has been front-page news on major Spanish language newspapers all week, and featured heavily on Spanish language television.  The U.S.'s largest and fastest growing minority, Latinos, is watching, today.  Educators and students from around the country have organized for and come out in support of the DREAM Act.  The next generation is watching, today.  Facebook and twitter have blown up with mentions of the DREAM Act, and traffic on the sites covering the DREAM Act is through the roof.  Business leaders, religious leaders, and military leaders have all come out strong in support of the DREAM Act.  If the Senate fails to move the DREAM Act forward today, we will all be watching and we won't just remember this November, but for the rest of our lives. 

The next generation isn't just watching whether the DREAM act will move forward, but whether the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell (DADT) will move forward.  Lady Gaga has galvanized youth for the repeal of DADT with her extensive twitter and facebook following in a way that probably hasn't been seen seen Barack Obama was elected.

According to a poll commissioned by First Focus, 70% of the U.S. public supports the DREAM Act.  Multiple polls show that a majority of the U.S. public supports the repeal of DADT.  Republicans, for the most part, are floating arguments about procedure.  They are saying that Democrats are playing politics with the National Defense Authorization Act.  Republicans are playing politics, too, and have used the procedure of the filibuster to grind the Senate to a halt for two years.  Playing politics is what politicians do.  The public doesn't care about politicians playing politics or what procedures are used as long as Congress does their job and gets things done.  It's time for Congress to get two things done that the majority of Americans support. 

Republicans, especially, face an important choice, today.  They can please their increasingly regional extremist base and relegate themselves to irrelevancy for a generation, or they can do the right thing and be competitive with the next generation of voters.

If we win, today, we will face an even steeper uphill battle, but we will all be watching.  Failure has not entered into my mind.  We will pass the DREAM Act and DADT will be repealed.  It is no longer a question of if, but a question of when.  The time is now and whomever stands in the way will regret it for a long time. 

The March issue of the Atlantic Monthly has an extensive piece on the impact of the country's joblessness on the Millennial Generation which has been one of the most effected in this country with an unemployment rate nearly twice the national average.

Not surprisingly it paints a pretty bleak picture and will "likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults."

Nobel Prize winning economist Edmund Phelps argues that the last several years of "prosperity" were a faux financial security based solely on unsustainable industries like home construction and the financial institutions that provided loans for them etc. As a result we are not merely seeing the result of the collapse of those industries we're also seeing the impact of our economic recession on top of that.

Phelps says that even in the event we are able to develop new industry, innovate like crazy, and complete "recovery" we're still in a pickle because the Millennial Generation is so big we'll have so many new people entering the workforce every year it'll be hard to sustain. He rejiggers an unemployment rate near 6.5 to 7.5% as being the "new normal" as we move forward.

"It’s likely, then, that for the next several years or more, the jobs environment will more closely resemble today’s environment than that of 2006 or 2007—or for that matter, the environment to which we were accustomed for a generation."

The piece goes on to examine Millennial unemployment specifically - saying that it is so rampant that the once stigma of joblessness has now evolved into an accepted norm. It even suggests that it happened at the best time for Millennials because the great-recession hit before many of them had mortgages or started families.

There are perks but there is also a debilitating blow-back

"Lisa Kahn, an economist at Yale, has studied the impact of recessions on the lifetime earnings of young workers. In one recent study, she followed the career paths of white men who graduated from college between 1979 and 1989. She found that, all else equal, for every one-percentage-point increase in the national unemployment rate, the starting income of new graduates fell by as much as 7 percent; the unluckiest graduates of the decade, who emerged into the teeth of the 1981–82 recession, made roughly 25 percent less in their first year than graduates who stepped into boom times.

But what’s truly remarkable is the persistence of the earnings gap. Five, 10, 15 years after graduation, after untold promotions and career changes spanning booms and busts, the unlucky graduates never closed the gap. Seventeen years after graduation, those who had entered the workforce during inhospitable times were still earning 10 percent less on average than those who had emerged into a more bountiful climate. When you add up all the earnings losses over the years, Kahn says, it’s as if the lucky graduates had been given a gift of about $100,000, adjusted for inflation, immediately upon graduation—or, alternatively, as if the unlucky ones had been saddled with a debt of the same size."

Its enough to incite a panic attack. The article quotes recent data from the National Association of Colleges and Employers who shows a 21% decline in job offers to college grads last year. The worst part is that it's going down again this year another 7%.

They go on to talk about the new org JobNob who aimed to connect recent college graduates for unpaid internships with new start-up companies in the Bay Area. The first event they had over 300 people attend, many in their mid to late 20's and 30's with tons of experience and multiple degrees from Stanford, Berkeley, and Harvard all desperate for jobs. New college grads couldn't compete.

"When experienced workers holding prestigious degrees are taking unpaid internships, not much is left for newly minted B.A.s. Yet if those same B.A.s don’t find purchase in the job market, they’ll soon have to compete with a fresh class of graduates—ones without white space on their résumé to explain. This is a tough squeeze to escape, and it only gets tighter over time."

This might also be the right time to mention that the average student exiting college is saddled with debt of over $23,000.

If that isn't frightening enough, the mental effects of young people who suffer a prolonged state of unemployment are staggering. The piece quotes the stereotype of youth being so flexible and adaptable to fluctuation in job security. But the reality is far worse.

"Examining national longitudinal data, Mossakowski has found that people who were unemployed for long periods in their teens or early 20s are far more likely to develop a habit of heavy drinking (five or more drinks in one sitting) by the time they approach middle age. They are also more likely to develop depressive symptoms. Prior drinking behavior and psychological history do not explain these problems—they result from unemployment itself. And the problems are not limited to those who never find steady work; they show up quite strongly as well in people who are later working regularly."

Decades after the Great Depression a study was done on men who suffered joblessness in the 1930's. They found these men "came across . . .as "beaten and withdrawn—lacking ambition, direction, confidence in themselves." Further unhealthy habits can develop from youth left in prolonged unemployment. Increased stress and the results from fewer financial resources, they say, can endure for a lifetime. The same could be said for the lack of health care for those left unemployed for long periods of time, and in the event of a tragic condition or accident those youth can be financially enervated into bankruptcy.

"Journalists and academics have thrown various labels at today’s young adults, hoping one might stick—Generation Y, Generation Next, the Net Generation, the Millennials, the Echo Boomers. All of these efforts contain an element of folly; the diversity of character within a generation is always and infinitely larger than the gap between generations. Still, the cultural and economic environment in which each generation is incubated clearly matters. It is no coincidence that the members of Generation X—painted as cynical, apathetic slackers—first emerged into the workforce in the weak job market of the early-to-mid-1980s. Nor is it a coincidence that the early members of Generation Y—labeled as optimistic, rule-following achievers—came of age during the Internet boom of the late 1990s."

Then the good article goes awry when they pull out people like Ron Alsop and Jean Twenge who both claim to be Millennial experts but are so jaded with their own old school philosophy they can't seem to navigate into the future. Twenge refers to youth as "Generation ME" which she bases on social networks being all about YOU. As we've seen the progress of this technology, her uneducated assumptions have been pretty well refuted. Alsop is the one who thinks Millennials are too filled with a sense of entitlement because we were given trophies as children. Despite my debunking of his work, Alsop, has yet to send me my first trophy. These fake experts love to criticize young people for quite simply adapting to the world Boomers have created.

If you indeed read this article rather than me covering it, I urge you to skip over this selection. It consistently brings up points that aren't understood by older generations. Social networks aren't about me they're about "we," its not "entitlement" to expect to be paid a living wage or have flexibility if you're a good employee, and finally this idea that young people turn jobs down because they're not sexy is insane. I have turned jobs down because I couldn't afford to take them unless I worked at Starbucks after work. These people make me furious.

In the end

"...The fact that so many young adults weren’t firmly rooted in the workforce even before the crash is deeply worrying. It means that a very large number of young adults entered the recession already vulnerable to all the ills that joblessness produces over time. It means that for a sizeable proportion of 20- and 30-somethings, the next few years will likely be toxic."

UPDATE: I just got a great email from a friend who said that the most interesting tidbit about the young people it talks about in this article is that regardless of the problems facing them, youth refuse to accept their "lot in life." Rather than entitlement its a sense of hope and optimism that if you don't like what you have you can work within the system to change it. He's right, this is a characteristic that has been tested with focus groups time and time again. Rather than abandon their dreams as their predecessors would have them do, Millennials are poised to instead adapt and evolve in their efforts to shoot for the moon.

Where some of these more negative "generational consultants" see Millennials as inefficient or unable to be managers, decision-makers, or entrepreneurs, my friend points out that it might be because none of them have ever thought it was a tangible goal for them without seeing peers in those roles. This could be primarily because older generations dictate the ways those roles are to function, leaving little room for creativity, innovation, or change.

H/t's: NC & RC

Saturday night reading... check it out:

• Mother Jones and Campus Progress are looking for "campus hellraisers" to profile in the September-October 2009 issue of Mother Jones. Check it out (self-nominations are allowed).
• A "No on Gay Marriage" campaign is an epic fail with young people.
• Christian punk and heavy metal music is blurring the lines between young evangelicals and secularists.
• MTV has announced that TRL, having been canceled last November, will be replaced by the Alexa Chung Show. The new show reportedly will heavily emphasize Twitter through courting online reaction to its music videos and celebrity guests.
• Some good news and some bad news from a survey regarding youth (ages 13-29) attitudes toward the Green Movement:

  Good: Youth see the Green Movement as "responsible" and "cool," and they believe it to be a very worthy cause.
  
  Bad: Many youth believe the Green Movement to be too demanding on a personal level, too time-consuming and too inconvenient.

• Tens of thousands of young Americans will be educated and trained to deal with America's energy problem, thanks to President Obama.
• An article in BusinessWeek calls for more business schools to rein in Millennial entrepreneurs by focusing increasingly on problem-solving.
• Terry McAuliffe is seriously hemorrhaging some youth voters in Virginia's Democratic gubernatorial primary.

The Wall Street Journal has a report about the state of broadband to the sticks and its progress in an economy aching under the pressure of 8W years.

Ms. Tumbridge pays $60 a month for a sattalite service so she can have a better ISP than the dial-up her neighbors are forced to use. She makes an interesting comment that its difficult to be a small business owner in today's tech world without having high speed access.

The piece continues

"Even cities that already have successful networks up and running plan to apply for stimulus funding to expand into rural areas. Wes Rosenbalm, who runs a fiber-optic broadband network in Bristol, Va., says reaching spread-out and sparsely populated regions of southwestern Virginia will cost much more than the initial $26 million he raised. "We are committed to getting to every area we can get to," Mr. Rosenbalm said in a recent interview.

Telecom and cable providers say they’ll eventually reach the rural areas where 10 million Americans are stranded with dial-up access. But for communities wanting to ring in the 21st century sooner rather than later, municipal projects might be their best hope."

As someone who lives in a rural state higher access to broadband builds jobs not just in developing the infrastructure but in skilled workforce like technicians. It also helps young people feel connected enough to want to stay in rural areas, telecommute, save family farms that continue to falter, and build small businesses to save our small towns.

Are the Telco's dragging their feet because of the cost/benefit analysis is too small, or are they dragging their feet because they're waiting for the government to come in and build it and then hand it over?