Barbara Ehrenreich is the lefty author who likes to write the kind of stories about the poors which most magazines consider too depressing or otherwise unmarketable. So it should come as no surprise that her journalism-school commencement address is really depressing. Food stamps are mentioned!

Speaking at the University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism Sunday May 16, in comments reprinted in the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday, Ehrenreich said she had been told to be upbeat. Ha, ha:

You are going to be trying to carve out a career in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. You are furthermore going to be trying to do so within what appears to be a dying industry.

On the bright side, j-grads, there's no risk you'll turn into entitled tools, since you'll be poor!

Welcome to the American working class... You'll be living some of the problems you report on — the struggle for health insurance, for child care, for affordable housing.

And once you get used to being poor, you'll never give up on journalism. Right, you cute little idealists?

Poverty won't stop us because we are all on a mission here.

Except for those of you going into PR, advertising, shill blogging or absolutely anything besides journalism, now that Barbara Ehrenreich has introduced you to your future life. Last one to sell out has to go pick up Barbara's county check!