June 5, 2011 by International Students for Social Equality
This summer, as schools go on break, and millions of students graduate from high school and college, young people throughout the United States are confronted with a basic problem: there are no jobs.
The unemployment rate for young people is disastrous: 18.4 percent. Hundreds of people apply for any available position. College graduates send out applications every day to no avail, then end up settling for low-wage jobs at fast-food restaurants and stores, if they get jobs at all.
Meanwhile, schools are being closed, and colleges are restricting admissions. Every day, the opportunity for a decent education is being taken way from more young people. Hundreds of thousands of teachers and educational staff have been laid off—with hundreds of thousands more to come—swelling class sizes and forcing students out of school.
A measure of the historical viability of a social system is the future it holds for the younger generation. From this standpoint, the conditions facing youth at the beginning of the new academic year are an indictment of the capitalist system.
More than two years after the supposed onset of the economic “recovery," mass unemployment continues unabated, particularly among youth. On an international scale, falling growth rates and rising joblessness make clear there is no real recovery. Austerity measures being imposed in the US, Europe and Japan are compounding the social disaster. Students have no reason to believe they will have a chance of finding a decent job after graduation.
Mankind has entered the second decade of the 21st century to find itself beset by unemployment, wars, inequality and poverty.
Despite great advances in technology and communications, twenty-five million people in the United States are without jobs. Worldwide, billions live in hunger and humanity is beset by unending wars.
After giving trillions of dollars to the banks, the US government—at both the state and federal level—is pushing through unprecedented cuts in education and other social programs. Meanwhile the financial elite, with the arrogance and sense of entitlement of an aristocracy, has exploited the crisis of its own making to vastly enrich itself at the expense of working people. At every job, wages have fallen and the workload has risen, to the direct benefit of the rich.
This war against working people is coupled with war abroad.
