Keeping a job is becoming more difficult. The last hired are the first laid off. The Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies found that young workers, ages 16 to 24, accounted for 95 percent of those fired after Sept. 11.

Northeastern University professor Andrew Sum, who co-authored the study, said the collapse of technology companies that employed recent graduates and those still enrolled in college was also a factor driving the increase in youth out of work. In addition, many fired young workers are not eligible for jobless benefits because their earnings fail to meet the minimum required to collect, he noted.

As the full extent of faked corporate debt and earnings emerges from the collapses of Enron and Global Crossing, the 401(k) retirement funds of these companies’ employees have vanished like a fist when you open your palm. Falling stock prices that flattened these companies hit workers the hardest. This is a preview of what privatizing Social Security could mean for millions of Americans’ retirements. There’s still plenty of bad private-sector debt out there.

In the meantime, the U.S. government has installed an interim government in Afghanistan. This is basically what the old European empires did in their colonies. Corporate journalists don’t cover American imperialism and stay employed for long. Just ask journalist Robert Parry, whose honest coverage of U.S. foreign policy under the Reagan/Bush I administrations earned him a ticket out of corporate magazines and newspapers.

Closer to home, many states are facing fiscal crises. California is no exception. Electricity deregulation drained the state’s coffers as sales tax revenue tumbled. At the same time there are people nearing the end of the 60-month term limits for federal cash assistance mandated by former President Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform. Can California and other cash-strapped states pick up where the federal government walked away?

Currently, Democrats and Republicans echo the Bush administration’s call for global war against the threat of terrorism, personified in the “axis of evil” the president outlined in his recent State of the Union address. Rep. Barbara Lee is the exception that proves the rule. Meanwhile, the U.S. military-industrial complex marches on. The president has proposed a fiscal year 2003 budget that is a cash cow for weapons contractors. The general public should be so lucky with his budget proposal.

Luck, if you can call it that with a straight face, is what America had during the 1990s. Then, a big, overvalued credit bubble drove economic growth. This bubble depended in part on a strong dollar, the world’s main currency. Continually rising stock prices also helped spur consumer spending, which accounts for about two-thirds of the nation’s economic activity.

This decade of debt-driven growth followed the end of the Cold War. One of this war’s hallmarks was U.S. politicians and pundits scorning the lack of press freedom in the state-run propaganda outlets of America’s official enemies.

In the U.S. now there is a similar totalitarian compliance in corporate journalism to political power. Take the slant on the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, which claims that this nation is a threat to the security of the United States. Virtually the rest of the world opposes this view that Iraq, a vanquished Middle East nation, is a security threat to the U.S. way of life.

To be sure, the threat to world security, environmental and social, is the U.S. lifestyle of being the world's largest consumer of oil. What is at stake for the Bush administration is U.S. energy corporations' control of Iraq, which has the world’s second-largest estimated crude oil reserves.

An American military invasion of Iraq to overthrow Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, a pre-Gulf War ally turned American enemy, would ultimately increase U.S. control over Iraq’s capacity to produce oil. Such a move by the Bush administration would hamper U.S. competitors such as France and Russia. Meanwhile, lethal economic sanctions persist against the Iraqi people, devastating the children, aged and infirm. Their bitter fate is a crime against humanity.

At this writing, corporate editors and reporters are far too busy painting U.S. foreign policy as a morality play between the forces of lightness and darkness. Accordingly, the American public is largely uninformed about deadly policies in Iraq and other countries such as Afghanistan and Colombia where acquiring more energy resources is the corporate prize behind the smoke about a battle between good and evil. Corporate-led foreign policies lead to war. The populations of warrior nations such as the U.S. foot the bill.

In America now there are 40 million people who lack health care, while upper-income households get tax cuts. The poor and nonwhite fill the nation’s prisons and jails, as corporate executives fleece taxpayers and workers.

Now it’s certainly true that many Americans may not want to spend time with U.S. government foes such as Iraq’s Hussein. However, he’s not making it harder for them to find and keep a job that covers the costs of living. The bottom line? It is unclear if the American public will continue to support war abroad while turning a blind eye to class conflict at home.

America's economic contraction and militaristic expansion are the terrible twins of corporate capitalism, impacting many people domestically and globally. It’s a small world and getting smaller.

Seth Sandronsky is an editor with Because People Matter, Sacramento’s progressive newspaper ssandron@hotmail.com

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