Racism and Unemployment

COPY OF MY MESSAGE TO THE NEWS HOUR, PBS.ORG, TODAY:

THE NEWS HOUR HITS A HOMER AND A SINGLE.
COME ON GUYS, SWING A LITTLE TRUER—THROUGH THE BALL

Your panel discussion of racism—was profound and rewarding to the audience, many of whom must have been touched by the common intellectual power of the panel to dig into relevant knowledge and conclude that the effect of popular racism in America post the Obama election was far less in the nation as a whole than President Carter felt it may be when he raised the issue.

The effect is more like that of pesky mosquitoes than of mosquitoes that spread malaria--as your show explained.

All I missed in the conversation was specific comparison to anti-Jewish feelings exploited by German propagandists before and during WW II. (Leon Blum was Prime Minister of France during part of that period.)

Contrasting the very successful examination of racism and its effect today was your attempt to enlighten the audience on unemployment and its financial roots.

Here you lacked a panel to talk of cause and effect, of the box we are in and of thought that may be outside the box.

If you had invited Mathew Forstater and James Galbraith to that "table" we might have heard of Functional Finance (or its proponent, the American economist Abba Lerner) and its relevance to the moment of your show.

PBS, who is strapped for funds, and billions of other entities, (mostly individual people,) who are victims of the fact that Abba Lerner's thought remains unheeded today (as it has been for the years when nothing less will meet our need,) need help!

As Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the IMF (and, coincidentally, a French Jew,) said on the air, the recession (depression) is not behind the American people (or people anywhere) who will lose their job tomorrow or in the months ahead.

Dominique may have wanted to mention Lerner and Functional Finance (although I doubt it), but it was the News Hour's duty to know more about the roots of unemployment than they do.

No human history can afford to be ignorant of racism or of unemployment. Or of anti-Jewish sentiment, for that matter. You have enlightened us on racism. You have left us in the dark on forthcoming unemployment.

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