USA: The Age of Charity

The age of cutting public expenses has been coming for some time now in the U.S. For example, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has, for the second year in a row, decided to cut public expenses 5 percent, in everything from education up to public transportation. But in addition to this period of making cuts, it seems that a period of charity has returned as well.

So, on August 4, Mayor Bloomberg announced the implementation of a special three-year program, valued at $130 million (91 million Euros), to support “blacks and Latinos [who] are not fully sharing in the promise of American freedom.” These young African Americans and Spanish-speaking groups form the statistic category of the underemployed: those who work part time and those who have quit seeking work.

So what is original in this new program? The fact that the mayor will put his hand straight into his own pocket to fund the program. His private institution will contribute $30 million, and Bloomberg also convinced George Soros to contribute with his institution. This is not the first time that American billionaires like Bloomberg and Soros have gotten involved in critical situations. During the 1970s in Pittsburgh, the center of the American metal forging industry, employment collapsed. But the so-called Robber Barons of the great industrial and banking dynasties that became rich during the 19th century due to railroads and the conquest of the West hustled to help the city. However, never in the past has a mayor of such a vast city as New York used his own money to help the citizens.

Bloomberg’s action comes in a time when numbers hide tragic situations that illustrate the very critical situation of the American economy. For example, it became known that, in July, only 117,000 jobs were created — a number large enough for the temporary recovery of Wall Street, but not enough to offer optimism when the country must create hundreds of thousands of jobs every month in order to counterbalance the naturally increasing numbers of the population. Last July President Obama used his stimulus program to set the goal of creating between 320,000 and 780,000 job openings each month!

Today the facts have overruled: A large part of the long-term unemployed, 6.3 million people and their families, will be placed in a category that does not appear often, a category that includes tens of thousands of homeless children in the highly illuminated nights of Las Vegas, where schools also offer daily lunch. This category also concerns 45,753,000 Americans who are forced to live on food stamps due to their lack of employment. In May their number had increased by 12 percent since the previous year.