Page 16 THE VILLADOM TIMES III • November 16, 2011 could do in any county. We need a fair minimum wage so people who can land any job at all can support themselves without further reliance on the rest of the taxpayers. When underpaid people qualify for special programs, guess who pays for them: people who receive decent pay until the tax man comes for it. The wages offered at a lot of bottom-line jobs are so low that the workers are better off collecting unemployment until they can scrape through to Social Security or qualify for some kind of disability or for wholesale public assistance of the type that should be available to people who can’t work – not those who simply don’t want to work. Northwest Bergen County is generally an exception, but our great nation includes plenty of people in both categories. You know the system has failed you, because of racism, bad schools, or the extinction of the sort of job you do best, so you find a way to ride it out by reducing your expectations and getting by on what a grateful administrator offers you to buy your vote, nurture future expendables for overseas military adventures, or fend off revolution. This happens all over the world. It’s happening here. People who can’t make it by working and can sort of make it by not working don’t even have to think about their best course. The only answer for America is to make the employers cover the entire cost of their employees. After all, the employers are the ones making the money. Money is a bad master, but a very good motivator. We also have to stop touting education as the answer to all our economic problems. People whose abilities or tastes don’t qualify them for four-year colleges probably won’t be able to find useful employment even if the government taxes the rest of us right into the poorhouse to cover what appears to be the two mandatory college degrees for an entry-level, white-collar job. A couple of years ago, WQXR, the last classical music radio station in the tri-state area, almost went out of business because the government cut its subsidies. PBS also teetered near the brink. Both of these valuable cultural resources survived because people donated their own money to keep them afloat. Those shows subsidized by the government are something else again. We celebrate the Fourth of July, for instance, with rousing patriotic songs by those who have never worn a uniform but know waving the flag and hating scary foreigners is good for business. We hear celebrations of the very genuine courage of Americans wounded or killed fighting in the Pacific, Asia, and Iraq, and we are told that they were hurt and their friends were killed protecting the United States. People in positions of authority say things like, “If it weren’t for you guys, we wouldn’t be speaking English.” Neither the Germans nor the Japanese ever developed a plausible four-engine bomber, while we developed three: the B-17 like the one my senior cousin was killed in over Germany in 1944; the B-24 like the one my older buddy John Pangburn bailed out of that same year near New Guinea, only to see his own buddies eaten by sharks; and the B-29 that burned the house my wife grew up in and a lot of women and children in the neighborhood. Could it be that the Germans and the Japanese had no ambitions outside their own vicinities? Could it be that we invented these ambitions to trick brave men into getting killed for no good reason, and to explain atrocities afterwards? Somebody show me a map of the landings the North Vietnamese or the North Koreans were able to effect on the North American continent. What chance did Saddam Hussein ever have of dictating peace terms in the White House? If we hadn’t thrown away 6,000 brave, worthwhile, and trusting young Americans this last time around in what we now know was a mistake, we would be out there in the streets of Allendale and Waldwick and Wyckoff fighting sword-wielding Tuaregs on camels rather than have them force our wives and daughters to wear veils, while Kim Il Sung and Ho Chi Minh glowered down at us from Mount Rushmore, right? The government subsidizes propaganda for the masses and the smart people pay for Beethoven and Mozart and documentaries (like “The War”) which offer an honest look at what actually happened and admit that atrocities were committed by people on both sides. The good and bad news is that the majority of American people, generous, trusting, and brave as they are, have begun to register their extreme distaste for any more foreign adventures at the behest of international corporations or self-serving foreign governments. In the short run, this could be bad for the economy, because weapons systems are among America’s few salable products. In the long run, it would be good for the survival of civilization. We need to do the same thing with jobs that we do with entertainment. Everybody who does useful work should get paid a living wage, and the cost should come not from the taxpayers but from the whopping salaries the people at the top pay themselves and their favorites. We can do this. The American submarine may be on the bottom right now, but the oil slick we’re exuding could just be a clever deception – or a warning that we’re done milking the taxpayers to bribe tyrants we can’t trust and support people who don’t support us. This time, when we blow ballast – without any more bailouts to bankrupt banks and corporations that can’t cope -- we should plan to avoid any more crash dives by establishing higher wages and lower taxes so people who want to can afford to buy American. Have you ever seen those movies where the captain and crew take their submarine all the way to the bottom of the ocean while they send up an oil slick and random rubble so the other guys think they’re finished? That’s where the American economy is right now. Official figures show that we’re at nine point something unemployment. That’s bogus. What happened is that so many people have been out of work for so long that they can no longer collect unemployment insurance. These people have fallen off the charts. Instead of going through the charade of looking for jobs that do not exist in certain categories, the unemployed who no longer qualify as such are plugging into disability programs while they wait for Social Security to lock in. This means that, often through no fault of their own, they are letting the rest of us support them. Unemployment insurance, covered by deductions from workers’ paychecks, once had its longest average duration of 21 weeks as recently as 1983. The average duration is now 39 weeks. The maximum is now 99 weeks, and many people are quickly heading there. From late 2007, when the crunch started to make itself felt, the number of people receiving unemployment benefits multiplied four-fold, reaching 11.5 million. That figure ostensibly lifted a little, but the lift is mostly an illusion. About two million people collected unemployment until their benefits ran out, and then they stopped collecting. Those who could do it might then qualify for what used to be called Welfare. To quality for Welfare, unless the standards have charged, you have to cease being a property owner or driving a late-model car. Once you lose the house and sell the car, you won’t starve to death as long as you stay sober and off drugs, but you won’t enjoy your life very much at the County Shelter or in subsidized housing. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke recently noted that the longer people are out of work, the less chance they have of landing a new job. Whatever skills they have erode as the former workers stay away from the changing technology of the workplace, and gray hairs and health problems related to the aging process don’t play well at the personnel department. For the first time in American history (without reference to new immigrants or minorities coping with the aftermath of slavery), we are now gradually forming a classic European “proletariat” of healthy adults who own no property, have no trade skills, maintain no investments or savings, and have nothing to lose short of their lives if the whole system collapses. This is not good. In the short term, Congress will shortly have a chance to extend unemployment for what would be the tenth time. If the program as it now exists doesn’t get another extension, another 2.2 million former workers will fall out of the unemployment support system by February 2012. Finger-pointing is as retrograde as finger-painting. The crunch had multiple origins, ranging from the Most Favored Nation status granted to China and the easy real estate credit policies of the later George W. Bush years to the decision to attack Iraq for reasons that remain to be adequately explained. Waging an expensive war for no good purpose when you already have a crumbling industrial base The only option is up Allendale Notebook Ecumenical Thanksgiving service set The Allendale Community of Churches will host its Ecumenical Thanksgiving Worship Service on Sunday, Nov. 20 at 3 p.m. This year’s service will be held at Highlands Presbyterian Church, 270 Franklin Turnpike in Allendale. A special Community Choir will sing as part of the service. Anyone who would like to be a part of this choir may contact Highlands Presbyterian at (201) 327- 4466. Everyone is invited to attend. Participants are asked to bring a donation of a non-perishable food item for the Center for Food Action. Proceeds from the offering collected during the service will also benefit the center. Board of education to meet The Allendale Board of Education will meet on Monday, Nov. 21 at 8 p.m. in the Brookside School Library. The school is located at 100 Brookside Avenue. Class of 2012 to host movie fundraiser Allendale’s Brookside School Class of 2012 will host a movie fundraiser at the Ramsey Theater, 125 East Main Street in Ramsey, at 10 a.m. on Nov. 19 and 20. The feature presentation will be “Twilight: Breaking Dawn.” Tickets are $8 in advance and may be ordered by sending a check made payable to “Brookside Class of 2012” to Gayle Lerch, 9 Butternut Road, Allendale, NJ 07401. Preordered tickets will be held at the door. Rotary sets Thanksgiving Pie Sale The Allendale/Saddle River Rotary Club is holding its Thanksgiving Pie Sale, which will feature pies from Di Piero’s in Woodcliff Lake. Order pies now for pickup on Nov. 21 or 22 in Allendale. Filling choices include pumpkin, apple, peach, blueberry, mince, coconut custard, and pecan. Crust choices include traditional or crumb. Pies are $10 for the small size, and $13 for the large size. For more information, contact Nickie Lisella at (201) 825-0500, extension 11 or stop in Terrie O’Connor Realtors, 75 West Allendale Avenue, Allendale, fill out a form, and drop off a check. Church offers homemade pies for sale The Archer United Methodist Church will be selling fresh and frozen apple pies on Tuesdays from 9 a.m. to noon and Sundays after the 10:30 a.m. service. For the past 29 years, the men, women, and children of Archer United Methodist Church have gathered on Tuesday mornings to make pies. Volunteers work as peelers, apple cutters, dough or spice mixers, “holy rollers,” or crust crimpers. More than 11,000 have been prepared (and eaten). Proceeds from this sale benefit the philanthropic efforts of the United Methodist Women. Archer Church is located at 37 East Allendale Avenue. For more information, call the office at (201) 327-0020. Rotary Club changes meeting venue The Allendale/Saddle River Rotary Club will hold its weekly meeting at Savini’s Restaurant, 168 West Crescent Avenue, Allendale. The group meets every Wednesday at 8 a.m. For more information, call (201) 566-3013 or e-mail bobtraitz@versizon.net.