Flush Rush: Desperate Times and Desperate Measures

Our current economic collapse is a consequence of failed and flawed Republican economic policies and an Administration that failed to take appropriate action to avoid the deepening disaster affecting Main Street, our neighbors.

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The broad numbers included below fail to present the personal toll:

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My hometown paper played the news relatively mildly as "Layoffs Spread to More Sectors of the Economy"; the Washington Post chose the slightly stronger, "Layoffs Cut Deeper into Economy"; the Los Angeles Times picked "Deluge of Layoffs Hits U.S. Economy"; the Indianapolis Star, "50,000 New Pink Slips Pile Up"; and the San Jose Mercury, "Bloody Monday: U.S. firms slash 50,000 jobs." At a news conference, the new president rattled off selected names from the all-star line-up of companies that were tossing out bodies and shutting down lives: "Over the last few days we've learned that Microsoft, Intel, United Airlines, Home Depot, Sprint Nextel, and Caterpillar are each cutting thousands of jobs. These are not just numbers on a page. As with the millions of jobs lost in 2008, these are working men and women whose families have been disrupted and whose dreams have been put on hold."

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Meanwhile, the one-day estimate of the number of layoffs, depending on how you were counting and whether you were speaking nationally or globally, rattled around the world -- more than 40,000, 50,000, 55,000, more than 60,000, 71,400, 76,000.

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Here are a few personal accounts:

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* A 21-year-old Milwaukee man who shot himself in the face after "he ran out of unemployment [insurance]."

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* A 43-year-old West Allis man who hanged himself in his basement with a belt. "[T]he mortgage payments are behind," his girlfriend told the police. "There are astronomical medical bills."

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* A 40-year-old Milwaukee woman who overdosed after having "financial problems."

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* A 24-year-old Milwaukee man, "fired from his job three weeks before," who suffocated himself with Saran Wrap.

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* And a 38-year-old Milwaukee man who shot himself in the head. He'd lost his job six weeks earlier.

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In January, less than an hour's drive south of Milwaukee, 37-year-old Staci Paul's car was pulled from Lake Michigan, but they couldn't find the body of the Kenosha, Wisconsin, woman. As an article in the Kenosha News noted, however, friends "said they knew things hadn't been easy for Paul. A single mother, she worked hard to find jobs and as the economy worsened, friends speculated, Paul might have run into some financial trouble. Court records also show Paul had been evicted from her home in October."

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Greenspan's Body Count: Steven L. Good

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Some of us rushed to embrace the anti-New Deal crowd, after all, we didn't live through the Depression and didn't want to pay for those silly things. Who needs unemployment? Who needs these safety net things? That is, until the tragedies become real and we watch the devastation. This is what those New Deal safety net things were about, after all.