Third World America - Arianna Huffington [31]
Henry Chalian was a vice president and relationship manager at JPMorgan when he was laid off in May 2009. “It was a shock to everyone, in every way possible,” he explains. “That said, the year before had been an unsettling one where every morning we came in, we said to each other: ‘We are still here!’ ” Chalian, who has a master’s degree from the London School of Economics, worked for Bear Stearns before he was hired by JPMorgan. “I managed relationships with some of the top independent research firms in the country,” he says. “A lot of changes occurred in the last year, but we thought our jobs were secure. I was laid off on the last day Bear Stearns’ severance was in place.”
Chalian considers himself luckier than most: His former company has an in-house career center for displaced workers for up to one year. He has access to career counselors on a weekly basis, and the center offers classes on networking, speaking, and interviewing skills. He even participated in a six-week seminar on using social media for job searches. “I have joined a number of LinkedIn groups associated with finance, prior employers, and school alumni,” he says, “I follow discussions, ask questions, and make comments.” Chalian has also been using Twitter, which he discovered can be a powerful job-searching tool. “There are a lot of smart and helpful career advisers, bloggers, and recruiters that I have discovered and now follow.”
He has participated in a variety of programs offered by his city and state to assist newly unemployed individuals, such as JumpStart NYC, which is a combined effort by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the New York City Economic Development Corporation for displaced financial service employees; he attended a one-week boot camp with educators from Harvard Business School; he spent six months at a digital media and e-commerce start-up incubator as part of an unpaid fellowship and consulting program; and he used a National Emergency Grant to participate in a two-week “Columbia Essentials of Management” program at Columbia Business School. He also contributes to a blog on WSJ.com called Laid Off and Looking, and he appeared in a CNN Money segment entitled “Castaway Bankers.”
It has now been a year since Chalian was laid off, and, despite all these efforts, he is still looking for a job. His severance package exhausted, he is now relying on unemployment and has cut into his retirement savings. “I have been very frugal,” he says, “but that goes only so far. I’m in a constant state of worry about money and the future. As busy as I have been, it has not been easy.”
One of the offshoots of this undercurrent of fear and anxiety is the anger building up across America.
In April 2010, hot on the heels of an outbreak of threats against members of Congress, came word that an Oklahoma Tea Party group was planning to form an armed militia to help defend the state against the perceived encroachment of the federal government—this in a state where, fifteen years earlier, Timothy McVeigh’s rage had turned deadly.133
The FBI was investigating an antigovernment extremist group that was sending letters to America’s governors demanding they resign or be “removed.”134 This followed the arrests of members of the Hutaree group, a radical Christian militia organization in Michigan that was plotting to kill police officers.135
When Tea Party members gathered for tax-day protests across the country, we were treated to a fresh wave of debate about whether these groups are fueled by anger, fear, racism, or class divisions.136 There was also talk about how much responsibility media outlets and certain political figures bear for inciting Tea Party crowds with violent rhetoric. (Sarah Palin urged her supporters to “reload,” and U.S. representative Michele Bachmann said she wants her constituents “armed and dangerous.”)137, 138
The rising tide of anger is part of a disturbing trend. According