Today’s announcement of unemployment rates for March has reminded me of an issue I wrote about a few years ago concerning work ethic and income. Today, the Associated Press reported:

Unemployment zoomed to 8.5 percent last month, the highest in a quarter-century, as employers axed 663,000 more workers and pushed the nation’s jobless ranks past 13 million. The hard times were only expected to get harder — a painful 10 percent jobless rate before long.

The current rate would be even higher — 15.6 percent — if it included laid-off workers who have given up looking for new jobs or have had to settle for part-time work because they can’t do any better. That’s the highest on record for that number in figures that go back to 1994.

In my paper, which was a rudimentary exercise in academic social research, I criticized an earlier article by Barry Bluestone in which he cites 10 primary reasons for income stratification. My primary criticism was that Bluestone ignored an important factor– work ethic. You can download a copy of my paper, “The Impact of Work Ethic on Income,” here.

Today’s unemployment report reminded me of this paper, because it raises yet another important factor– the economy at large. It would be interesting to research how an economic recession affects income stratification.

John McCain recently displayed yet another example of how truly disingenuous he is, by criticizing the Georgian-Russian Conflict with the statement that, “In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.” Watch the video below, and then let’s talk.

I don’t want to spend too much time on this blog just talking politics. This site is supposed to be about the intersection of capitalism and culture. But, it’s an election year, and, I suppose you just can’t get away from it. Lord knows I’ve spent enough time writing about the virtues of Ron Paul.

The fact that John McCain was able to come from so far behind in the primaries to achieve the position he’s in now makes me sad for the gullibility of so many Americans. The man is utterly, desperately, completely disingenuous. He talks about how much he sympathizes with people who disagree with him, which would be great, except that he’s so obviously full of crap. His advisers are lobbyists and sycophants who tell him that the policies he wants to work, will work. And how can anyone have fallen for the way he laid it on so thick during one of the Republican debates when he took his microphone off the podium and walked out to address the wife of a veteran who disagreed with the war? That stunt should have buried him. When a person is truly compassionate, these gestures emerge organically. When a person is deceitful and conniving, these gestures are contrived. And how can ANYONE not see this in John McCain?

Don’t forget how the late Tim Russert caught John McCain being disingenuous about the war earlier this year. The man is a hypocrite. Why are so many Americans buying his lines? About this most recent gaff, Huffington Post had this to say:

It was the type of foreign policy rhetorical blunder that has regularly plagued the McCain campaign and could have diplomatic ripples as well. Certainly the comment was meant in innocence. But for those predisposed to the notion that the U.S. is an increasingly arrogant international actor, the suggestion by a presidential candidate that, in this day and age, countries don’t invade one another – when the U.S. is occupying two foreign nations – does little to alleviate that negative perception.

I suppose the larger issue does, in fact, pertain to culture, if not capitalism: We’re a nation very often, very easily led by men of mediocrity.

Over at Pressing The Flesh, another politics blog, I ran across this recent YouTube video of the late Tim Russert interviewing John McCain on Meet The Press. He traps McCain by making him eat some of his own words about Congress’s responsibility in wartime situations.

Here’s a despicable example of the efficacy of public health systems. Brooklyn’s Kings County Hospital (a public hospital run by the city) left a woman waiting for treatment for nearly 24 hours before she keeled over on the floor and died. Multiple guards came and looked at her as she writhed on the floor, and they did nothing. The incident was all caught on camera. What’s worse, the hospital staff falsified logs of the patient’s activities, reporting that she got up and got herself a drink of water when the security camera in the waiting room proved she was lying on the floor in distress at the time.

As if that wasn’t enough, the hospital only released the tape because they were compelled to by law in the course of exchanging evidence in a civil suit that has been brought against them by the New York Civil Liberties Union. They have now agreed to try to reduce the waiting time at these public hospitals to 10 - 13 hours over the next several months. You read that right; 10 - 13 hours is their new goal for treating patients. Talk about chinning off the curb.