Announcement:
On Thursday, 8-23-2012, at 4.40PM PST/7.40PM EST, PITAPOLICY Blog Founder, Mehrunisa Qayyum, will be participating as a guest on the new Huff Post Live show’s conversation “Constitutionally Flawed”. The discussion will be informative and energetic as Huff Post has invited experts and members of the Huff Post Blogger community to speak about constitution forming in the Arab Spring nations, and whether this sign of “democracy” is actually beneficial.
The discussion has been born from two pieces: one by a Prospect Magazine blogger and also the riots last week from Tunisian women opposing the syntax and way they are being referred to in the proposed Tunisian constitution, which was discussed by Qayyum in a Huffington Post Blog piece.
We hope you’ll tune in for the show: Thursday at 7:40 PM Eastern Standard Time!
Here’s PITAPOLICY’s most recent commentary on Huffington Post Blog’s Business and Politics Sections, which highlights its participation in the Al Mubadarah weekly Tweet discussion: #ArabDev…
America’s Knowledge Economy Needs Its Creative Youth
Irony is when I walk past a set of tents pitched in New York, or Washington, DC’s McPherson Square, and my colleague, who works on international development in the Arab world, exclaims surprise at the number of homeless people and unemployed youth occupying those tents.
The Occupy Wall Street movement coincidentally emerged a few months after Tunisia’s and Egypt’s underemployed youth organized in the streets. As Americans, we are told to shift our focus from exporting goods to exporting services. In an earlier blog post, Angela Glover Blackwell, CEO of PolicyLink, said that the U.S. must embrace its diverse demographics to propel a “knowledge economy.” Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph E. Stiglitz, specifically calls this the “creative economy” because the U.S. has already spent its 20th century knowledge investment. What does that mean? And where do we go first? Let’s work backwards from the goal: employ energetic, fresh graduates who might set up tents after an unsuccessful six-month job search or underemployment.
I argue that the initiatives NGOs are pushing for the youth employment/entrepreneur opportunities in the Middle East and North Africa region actually present a gateway to opportunities for our own American graduates.
Where Do We Go First?
Take a look at the states that have the higher unemployment rates according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics: North Carolina (9.4%) , Georgia (9.0%), New York (8.9%), Illinois (8.7%), Michigan (8.6%) and double digit numbers like 10.7 percent in California. (Even though Washington, DC may be cushioned with public sector jobs, unemployment stood at 9.1 percent in June.) Although each of these states stretch across the U.S., they all include top tier universities with hundreds of 2013 graduates that will join their 2012 alumni who are still searching for full-time (and fulfilling) employment. In a nutshell, these…click here to continue
