I spent the last two days away from home on a job site in Tulsa. One of my clients was considering switching to a competitor. I have a "resource recovery" company---or, put another way, we scrounge the back lots of industrial plants looking for commodities which can be recycled and re-used. Our employees are well trained and long term and they do well on earnings. They drive our trucks and equipment to remote locations. and my insurance company requires drug testing. Because we control costs and like to make a bit of a profit there is a limit on how much we'll spend for a motel. When I'm on the road, which I don't enjoy, I stay where my workers stay.

Heartbreak Motel sits on the intersection of two truck routes. The four corners are a stark melding of the food chain and the employment ladder. On one corner is a convenience store and cash-only gas station---the bottom rung of life in a gritty America.  Outside, behind the store, four homeless people stand around a compressor smoking and making ready for the night with pieces of card board to sleep on. A police car idles two hundred feet away, pointed in their direction. I say to hell with it and walk over to the store. A small bottle of milk and some cookies might come in handy if I wake up at the motel in the middle of the night and have the creeps. As I try to go into the store a guy forces me off the sidewalk. I ignore him. Coming back out a woman blocks my path, "Are you stayin' over there for the night?"

Across the street is another gas station. It takes cash or even credit cards and has no homeless people sleeping out back  The station's food counter features turkey legs on a roller grill---which is a novel idea and serves as dinner for a lot of the patrons who stop there.  Rung two.

I finally make it over to the opposite corner, rung three, the Waffle House. There, hard working employees yell greetings when you come in the door.  Three employed truck drivers are having grilled pork chops and waffles. They will sleep in their bunkers on the big rigs which are parked out back. After a great breakfast of eggs over-easy and grits at 8:00 p.m. I cross four lanes of traffic on foot to get back to Heartbreak Motel. Life is not so bad. Maybe I'll sleep through the night and won't need the milk and cookies.  Perhaps it's a good thing to take a breather from my media addictions.

I found out later that there had been an Occupy Wall St. protest on the other end of town, that there was an FOMC meeting of the Federal Reserve in Washington, and that there had been muddy political wrestling all over the internet 

The next morning over at the client company the owner, Bud Ratliff, and I quickly worked things out. "Oxy, I need a price break." I said, "Where do I need to be to keep your business?" He told me and I said, "O.K." Then he said, "Do you know anyone who'd like to buy that used recycle machine over there?" 

I told him, "Bud, I just don't think it's repairable. But I'll give you a thousand dollars for the pump that's on it."  Bud said, "O.K. I'll have Joe unbolt it. Just credit my invoice. By the way I'm going to recommend your company to some folks down the street. They are good payers. I've known them for thirty years."

Lose money on each deal and make it up in volume. Sometimes I feel as if I am the one at the bottom of the food chain--in more ways than just reclaiming industrial waste.

Bud is a tough task master but you can deal with him on a personal basis. His employees are neat and hard working. They are middle aged and amiable. They know they have the best deal available to them in this economic climate. A small company. An owner who is fair and approachable. Bud treats them with respect. Rung four.

Neither Bud or I are likely to hire the folks down around Heartbreak Motel.  It's not impossible, just not likely. It's a matter of qualifications. It's a matter of responsibility to clients and customers. The people on rungs one, two and and many on rung three are there for the duration unless something is done. Any rational person can see that we need a massive public works project to get these people back on their feet, get them some training, get their self esteem and personal lives in order and perhaps get them into employable status. I am not the government. Everyone in my company, including me, was unemployed before signing on. But my company is not a rehab center or training center. There is a role for government. We need programs for the long term unemployed and the unemployable.  

Leaving Heartbreak Motel and a neighborhood suitable for a modern day Dickens' novel I headed back to Dallas thinking maybe I should hire a good salesmen who doesn't mind being on the road; we could get more accounts, make more money and raise our motel allowance. I wondered if Bud had snookered me.

The Fed chairman Ben Bernanke was on Sirius radio. After listening to him for an hour I concluded that Fed members might better have had their meetings at Heartbreak Motel--which has 5 large conference rooms, last used before the late 80's oil crash. The Fed might have pumped some travel expenses back into a local economy where it could have done some good. The members might have eaten out in the local neighborhood, or taken the shuttle over to the OWS protest at the other end of town. They might have learned the street-level distinctions between the employed, the unemployed and the unemployable.

But the best that Bernanke could come up with on the short notice of a two day meeting was that our high unemployment is cyclical and, incredibly, it's a longer cycle than anticipated and that's why it will take more time for monetary policy to work. Oh, and, say, if unemployment were structural, by chance---well, then, monetary policy wouldn't be effective at all. That was brilliant.

I hope I don't sound like a cranky capitalist or that I'm down on people. What put me in a foul mood was realizing that Bernanke is simply throwing in the towel like everyone else. He of course won't come out and say in plain language that we need programs to solve structural unemployment--or even if he thinks our unemployment is structural.  There are not more than a hand full of politicians in the entire country who will stand up and have the guts to say that we need a CCC or WPA---which to my mind is the only way out of this unemployment mess.  Can anyone look at the Heartbreak Motel intersections of America and conclude that we have anything other than structural unemployment? No one will admit the facts.

The sad truth is that every company in the U.S. could hire a salesman or two and it wouldn't help people down on the lower rungs of society. I don't see anything in the economic and political mix right now which is going to make a dent in the ranks of the long term unemployed and the unemployable. And that's the real heart breaker.