"Los Desaparecidos" is a Spanish term that gained particular meaning during all the insurrections in Latin America and South America in the 20th Century. Translated to English it means roughly "those who have disappeared." Wikipedia has an entry defining the term thusly: "A forced disappearance occurs when force is used (by, for example, agents of a state) to cause a person to vanish from public view, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty (and/or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person), thereby placing the victim outside the protection of law."
In America, this very moment, nearly a million former contributors to society have suddenly become "Los Desaparecidos," just last month! They have vanished from official public view, made invisible, statistically assassinated by the officials at the Bureau of Labor; simply dropped from the labor force so the BLS would not have to report the real level of unemployment in this country.
The statistics, cleverly masked and watered down by the Bureau of Labor, tell the cold hard tale in mathematics if looked at honestly. The BLS has been omitting people from the unemployment rolls who are “discouraged” and have stopped looking for work. In fact, they have removed them from the labor force entirely! Over a million were whisked away to limbo last month alone. So while the BLS reported only 263,000 lost jobs last month, if you dig deeper into their statistics and subtract the total reported employed today from the total reported 30 days ago you get an entirely different number: there are 995,000 fewer employed this month!
Blogger Karl Denninger does the ruthless math: “Civilian Labor Force: Aug, 2009=154,879,000 to Sep 2009=153,617,000 (according to BLS.) Employed: 140,074,000 down to 139,079,000 this month. That's a loss of 995,000 jobs, not 263,000, and the labor force contracted by 1,262,000 people!” That’s reality. Fudge it as much as you will, but those folks are sitting at home without jobs today as I write this. Six to nine months from now they’ll be on the street when their unemployment benefits run out. The psychological shock of a job loss in this climate must be devastating to these people. They don’t have a nifty $71 million severance package like BofA CEO Ken Lewis.
In a way, these unfortunate people have now become the invisible ones of our society. You know them when you encounter them on the street--a homeless person, someone begging change, or food. We have all developed a nifty set of blinders to help us pretend we don't see these people, and the thought that they are just pan handling money for drugs or alcohol makes us want to turn away or walk bruskly by, not seeing them, relegating them to the realm of the invisible, "Los Desaparecidos."
I met one last week at the local Farmer's Market. The place is usually packed with shoppers, with over a hundred booths selling produce, pastries, barbecue, and a whole range of tasty hot foods. A man approached me and asked for money so he could get something to eat. I decided to see him, make him visible, and not to walk away. But to insure the money was going for food and not drugs and alcohol, I instead walked him over to a nearby taco booth and let him choose anything on the menu he wanted. He ordered a Chile Relleno.
How would it feel, I wondered, to be among that crowd, seeing all the food on display, smelling it cooking, yet not have money to buy anything--to have to approach strangers in the street and beg for food. America--If we are ever going to turn this economy around we must realize that it starts on "Main Street" with us. We have to take care of each other, because Uncle Sam is too busy looking after the wellbeing of the big financial institutions to be bothered with us. And taking care of each other can happen a hunderd different ways. It could mean volunteering at your local school or church, or with City Hall. It could mean making a donation to a local food bank or homeless shelter. Or it could mean simply choosing to see those invisible people on the streets, Los Desaparecidos, and to smile and say yes to them instead of walking away. The rest of the cheery news about los desaparacedios is here.
