Joel Lopes Da Silva on the Web!

Thousands of workers are losing their jobs. America now faces the hard task of getting them back to work

MOIRA MCKAMEY is one of many Americans with more free time than she would like. In November DHL, an express delivery company, said that it would close its American domestic operations at the end of January. Up to 10,000 jobs may be lost in Wilmington, Ohio, where DHL has its main hub for domestic traffic, and where it is the town’s largest employer. Ms McKamey’s job has already vanished. She is trying to keep busy but, on a break from painting her kitchen a cheerful yellow, she succumbs to tears. She worked at the hub for 20 years. Her husband is a small farmer; she supplied a steady income and the family’s health insurance. She will be 52 this month. “I just never thought I would have to start all over at my age,” she explains.

America’s overall unemployment rate is 6.7%. But in some states sweeping lay-offs make the outlook much gloomier. Wilmington’s predicament is among the worst in Ohio’s recent history, while in Michigan at least 90 firms have announced firings in the past two months. More will surely come as the Big Three carmakers cut costs and possibly enter bankruptcy. Town and state officials across America now face a daunting prospect: helping millions of workers find new jobs. ...

A blue-collar military town transforms itself into a white-collar security cluster

UNTIL the government closed it in 1996, the navy base in Charleston was the region’s economic engine. The navy was Charleston’s largest employer, directly providing work for more than 22,000 people. But after a decade of decay, some 340 acres (140 hectares) of the site is now part of a 3,000-acre redevelopment plan in North Charleston called Noisette, billed as “a city within a city” and costing $3 billion over 20 years. The redeveloped navy shipyard has already attracted a number of green businesses. Clemson University’s research campus has also moved there.

Partly as a result, the region’s economy is healthier and more diversified than it was a decade ago. Job growth for the Charleston region was 16.5% between 2000 and 2007; nationally, it was less than half that. Charleston’s growth in GDP, wages and bank deposits all outpace national averages. Household income has increased by 30% since 2000. In July Inc, a magazine for entrepreneurs, described it as among the best cities for doing business. ...

One of America’s great public intellectuals died on Christmas Eve

IN THE early 1990s America’s opinion-makers competed to outdo each other in triumphalism. Economists argued that the “Washington consensus” would spread peace and prosperity around the world. Politicians debated whether the “peace dividend” should be used to create universal health care or be allowed to fructify in the pockets of the people or quite possibly both. Francis Fukuyama took the optimists’ garland by declaring, in 1992, “the end of history” and the universal triumph of Western liberalism.

Samuel Huntington thought that all this was bunk. In “The Clash of Civilisations?” he presented a darker view. He argued that the old ideological divisions of the Cold War would be replaced not by universal harmony but by even older cultural divisions. The world was deeply divided between different civilisations. And far from being drawn together by globalisation, these different cultures were being drawn into conflict. ...

Another look inside the president-elect’s BlackBerry, soon to be confiscated on security grounds

“FIRST the good news. While the recession is getting worse, the financial crisis that started it has been contained—for now. The government has had to bail out only one big financial institution in the past six weeks.

The bad news is that the Bush administration and the Fed had nothing resembling a consistent strategy. They crushed Fannie’s and Freddie’s stock holders. They saved Citigroup’s. Ad-hockery is costly: it keeps private capital on the sidelines for fear of being wiped out in the next Sunday night rescue. And the government is now on the hook for perhaps trillions of dollars of guarantees and new capital, in return for which it got no extra power to protect the system and the taxpayer in the future. ...

A splendid tradition in its 109th year

DECORATING the tree, sending out new year wishes, counting birds? Thousands of Americans have adopted the annual holiday tradition of the Christmas bird count, now in its 109th year and run by the Audubon Society. From Canada to South America and points in between experienced birdwatchers and novices, armed with binoculars, checklists and bird guides, have been journeying to forests and fields.

In the 19th century it was common for hunters to bag a Christmas bird for dinner and enjoy a competitive “side hunt” for sport at the same time. In 1900 Frank Chapman, an ornithologist, suggested a count instead of a kill at Christmas time. Only 27 observers in 25 places in the United States and Canada took part in that first hunt. In the 2007-08 three-week count, 59,918 people took part and 57,704,250 birds were tallied. ...

The benefits awaiting America’s unemployed are outdated and skimpy

COMPARED with the systems in other industrialised countries, the American unemployment-insurance (UI) scheme pays lower benefits for less time and to a smaller share of the unemployed. In expansions this encourages the jobless to return quickly to work—and unemployed Americans do indeed work harder at finding jobs than their European counterparts (see chart). But in recessions, when there is less work to return to, it causes hardship. Like America’s training system, UI is ripe for attention from the incoming Obama administration.

Like much of the social safety net, the current UI system was a product of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. States were prodded to provide benefits in accordance with federal guidelines; in return the federal government paid their administrative costs. But the system has not kept up with changes in America’s labour force. ...

The next president is already making his mark on America’s cities

DELMAR BOULEVARD is an arterial road running through some of the poorest and richest, and most racially divided, neighbourhoods of St Louis, Missouri. Some city aldermen are now trying to rename the street after Barack Obama before he takes office.

St Louis is not alone in its efforts to stick Mr Obama’s name on public property. Opa-locka, in Miami-Dade County, Florida (one of the most dangerous cities in America), plans to rename one of its avenues after the next president. A Long Island elementary school in Hampstead, New York, recently changed its name from Ludlum to Barack Obama after students organised a campaign. Another Long Island school thought of doing the same until parents intervened. One in Portland, Oregon, is still considering it. ...

Tougher enforcement and the recession have cut the flow of immigrants; but the state of the economy has made it harder to overhaul a broken system

UNTIL recently, most of the people who came to Emilio Amaya’s office in San Bernardino were working illegally. Now the flow of immigrants has slowed, and those who used to toil on building sites and in restaurant kitchens are taking long breaks to visit their relatives. Fortunately, a new line of business has emerged. Mr Amaya is helping people fill in forms that will enable them to move their possessions back to Mexico.

It is an abrupt reversal of a once seemingly inexorable trend. Ever since 2002, when America began to recover from a mild economic downturn, migrants both legal and illegal have streamed over the border. By 2006 Americans rated immigration as the nation’s second-most-important problem after the Iraq war, according to Gallup. A bold attempt to reform immigration laws the following year was scuppered by an extraordinary outburst of popular anger. Yet, almost at that moment, the problem began to go away. ...

Barack Obama’s education secretary is a diplomatic reformer

DURING the election campaign the economy submerged most talk of education. But beneath the surface, a debate churned between the self-proclaimed reformers and the teachers’ unions. By choosing Arne Duncan, Chicago’s schools chief and one of his own basketball buddies, Barack Obama this week has managed to please both sides.

School reformers had been edgy for weeks, noting that Mr Obama’s transition team included Linda Darling-Hammond, an education professor at Stanford University. Ms Darling-Hammond is a vocal critic of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the federal law that promotes testing and accountability. Many feared that she would nudge Mr Obama towards the unions or even become education secretary herself. ...

When it comes to mismanagement, Congress is hard to beat

IF THERE is one thing Congress excels at, it is finishing its tasks late and over budget. It delivered most of its 2008 budget three months late. In September it failed to pass, first time round, the Troubled Asset Relief Programme, which gave the Treasury wide authority to intervene in distressed financial markets; the Democrats had to add a slew of sweeteners to muster enough votes the second time. But nowhere has Congress’s penchant for inefficiency been more manifest than in the new Capitol Visitor Centre, a 580,000 square foot (54,000 square metre) subterranean hall lined in white marble, which has just opened next to the Capitol itself.

The original intentions were good. For years, crowds eager to enter the nexus of American democracy have had to wait in long lines snaking around the building’s scrubby gardens. This has been a particularly unpleasant business in the summer months, when the heat and humidity are unyielding, and one that resulted in a lot of sweaty tourists then tramping around the hallowed spaces. No longer will senators and their staffs have to cope with the smell, a relieved Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, proclaimed earlier this month. With the opening of the centre, sightseers will pass through metal detectors and queue up for tours amid air conditioning and plentiful lavatories. While they wait, they can admire some of the statues originally sent in by various states for display in the Capitol proper, such as Hawaii’s gold-covered King Kamehameha. ...