Touching the third rail?

Romney and Bain Capital?  Do it again, Newt and Rick!

Update:

The end of the beginning?

Or the beginning of the end? Factories stall worldwide, U.S. jobless claims rise

Nearly 50% of the Young People in Greece and Spain Are Unemployed

Robert Reich

Iceland

The Republicans' Farcical Candidates  A Club of Liars, Demagogues and Ignoramuses

New Hampshire GOP Speaker Discourages Students From Voting Because They’ll Vote ‘Liberal’

Hurricane season 2011.

Deliberate pushing of minorities into subprime mortgages.

Strange.  A rich man who realizes he doesn't create jobs (demands from the customers does) and wants to be taxed more.

And, btw, we are killing our oysters.

We need to give these out for free....

click to embiggen...

I think the Mayans messed up

And it should be 2011 that the world ends. Or at least unravels. Or idiots take over....

Supermoon!

Radiation from Japan reaches California... just a little bit.

The 'small government' Republicans would like to make the IRS the uterus police.

The NRA goes off half-cocked.

The reason the neocons were begging Obama to attack Libya. Wait for it.....Surprise!! Oil.

Washington DC doesn't give a fuck about the jobless.

Ann Coulter declares that radiation is good for you... which explains everything about her.

Corporate greed

Is why we are in an economic recession.

Bob Herbert has the figures:

The recession officially started in December 2007. From the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2009, real aggregate output in the U.S., as measured by the gross domestic product, fell by about 2.5 percent. But employers cut their payrolls by 6 percent.

In many cases, bosses told panicked workers who were still on the job that they had to take pay cuts or cuts in hours, or both. And raises were out of the question. The staggering job losses and stagnant wages are central reasons why any real recovery has been so difficult.

“They threw out far more workers and hours than they lost output,” said Professor Sum. “Here’s what happened: At the end of the fourth quarter in 2008, you see corporate profits begin to really take off, and they grow by the time you get to the first quarter of 2010 by $572 billion. And over that same time period, wage and salary payments go down by $122 billion.”

That kind of disconnect, said Mr. Sum, had never been seen before in all the decades since World War II.

In short, the corporations are making out like bandits. Now they’re sitting on mountains of cash and they still are not interested in hiring to any significant degree, or strengthening workers’ paychecks.

Productivity tells the story. Increases in the productivity of American workers are supposed to go hand in hand with improvements in their standard of living. That’s how capitalism is supposed to work. That’s how the economic pie expands, and we’re all supposed to have a fair share of that expansion.

Corporations have now said the hell with that. Economists believe the nation may have emerged, technically, from the recession early in the summer of 2009. As Professor Sum writes in a new study for the labor market center, this period of economic recovery “has seen the most lopsided gains in corporate profits relative to real wages and salaries in our history.”

Worker productivity has increased dramatically, but the workers themselves have seen no gains from their increased production. It has all gone to corporate profits. This is unprecedented in the postwar years, and it is wrong.

Are there no workhouses?

Bits and bytes

Rate your lawmaker.

California voting issues.

Andre Bauer: 'Flat-Out Lazy' People Are The Real Cause Of The Immigration Problem

Dick Cheney rises from the dead.

Tom Tomorrow takes on Glenn Beck.

Goldman Showers ... the title of our new era. (via trifecta in comments)

Just so you know

You are unemployed because you like it. So says Tom DeLay, and he should know!

"You know," Delay said, "there is an argument to be made that these extensions, the unemployment benefits keeps people from going and finding jobs. In fact there are some studies that have been done that show people stay on unemployment compensation and they don't look for a job until two or three weeks before they know the benefits are going to run out.

Host Candy Crowley: Congressman, that's a hard sell, isn't it?

Delay: it's the truth.

No concept on what regular people go through, is there? Where did they get the concept that poor people are lazy, that bad things happen to bad people, that somehow being chosen by the people to serve in Congress is like being chosen by God to do whatever you want to because you are special and everybody else is not.... Is there something in the water in Washington D C that makes people go mad?

Is it power? Or lead?

Dear Santa

Send jobs.

More jobs, please

Paul Krugman of the New York Times:

But there’s also, I believe, a question of priorities. The Fed sprang into action when faced with the prospect of wrecked banks; it doesn’t seem equally concerned about the prospect of wrecked lives.

And that is what we’re talking about here. The kind of sustained high unemployment envisaged in the Fed’s own forecasts is a recipe for immense human suffering — millions of families losing their savings and their homes, millions of young Americans never getting their working lives properly started because there are no jobs available when they graduate. If we don’t get unemployment down soon, we’ll be paying the price for a generation.

So it’s time for the Fed to lose that complacency, shrug off that fatalism and start lending a hand to job creation.

Why do banksters get a hand and the economic engine of the country ... the middle class ... gets the finger?

Watch the US go down the tubes

As we lose job after job...

h/t to Bryan of Why Now?

It's WTF Thursday!

Ex-California Governor Jerry Brown is thinking of running ... for governor?!

San Diego Democratic women are highly dangerous beasts! As are pastors in Texas. They are the worst!

Explains why Bin Laden wanted to attack the US. He visited Indiana and Los Angeles. Sorry about that, guys....

Wonderfully awfully ironic ads from the past.

We knew this just from seeing the photos:

Israel inflicted "wanton destruction" in the Gaza Strip during its 22-day war on the coastal enclave in December and January, Amnesty International, the London-based human rights group has said.

In a 117-page report released on Thursday, Amnesty cited evidence that Israeli troops put children and other civilians in harm's way "by forcing them to remain in or near houses which they took over and used as military positions".

I really think Israel crossed the line on this and has lost an immense amount of worldwide support. The 'victims' have become the very thing that victimized them in the first place: bloodthirsty heartless thugs.

Banks and corporations are trying to tell us everything is fine and on the mend, we can go back to spending wildly. Odd that our 'recovery' seems to be a jobless one:

The American economy lost 467,000 jobs in June and the unemployment rate edged up to 9.5 percent in a sobering indication that the most painful downturn since the Great Depression has yet to release its hold.

And Europe hits a ten year high:

Unemployment in the 16-nation euro zone has climbed to 9.5 per cent, its highest rate in a decade, EU data show.

More than 15 million people are out of work across the zone, with around 273,000 jobs lost in May, the Eurostat data agency estimated.

The increase in jobless was expected, with the eurozone experiencing a 2.5 per cent drop in output in the first quarter of 2009.

"Deep and extended economic contraction, depressed business confidence and deteriorating profitability is pushing unemployment up sharply across the eurozone," Howard Archer, an economist at consultants IHS Global Insight, said.

The May eurozone unemployment rate was up from 9.3 per cent in April and 7.4 per cent in May 2008.

But if you do have a job...there is no escape from your office!

Obama administration being secret about Cheney's interview with the investigators over the Plame affair.

Ants are taking over the wooorrrrrlllddd!

And the most WTF moment of all: Cafferty asks: Good idea to allow guns in bars?

What, no job openings for arrogant fucking bastards?

Think Progress:

Former officials of the Bush administration have had a notoriously hard time finding work. In February, the Wall Street Journal reported that “only 25% to 30% of ex-Bush officials seeking full-time jobs have succeeded.” The New York Times reports today that one of the down on his luck Bushies is top Cheney aide David Addington:

David S. Addington, a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney who was a forceful voice in internal legal debates, is also said to still be looking for work. The former Pentagon general counsel William Haynes II had been nominated by Mr. Bush for an appeals court judgeship, but was blocked because of his role in detention policies.

The Times suggests that the inability of Addington and other Bush lawyers to find work is a “likely consequence” of the fact that they “blessed conduct that most mainstream legal scholars contend was, in fact, illegal.”

Why can't he go work for Cheney? I'm sure he'd have an extra chair in his homemade secure undisclosed location... a man's gotta keep his hand in for the upcoming shadow government.

Coming around full circle

A homeless tent city by Sacramento, growing by 50 people a week. Then compare to the same area photos of a 1936 depression tent city.

Brother, can you spare a job?

The labor market plunge continues. Employers shed 651,000 jobs in February—the largest one-month fall in employment since 1949—and total job losses have reached 4.4 million since the recession began in December 2007. More than half of these losses—2.6 million—occurred just since October after the trickle of jobs loss turned into a torrent.

The unemployment rate shot up to 8.1 percent in February, from 7.6 percent in January. There are 5 million more people unemployed compared to a year ago as the labor-market both loses jobs and fails to employ new entrants. This is the largest annual jump in the number of unemployed since the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics began tabulating this data just after World War II. Most of the unemployed—62.3 percent—are out of work because they lost their job, higher than any point since 1982.

I think we've been here before....

Brother, can you spare a dime?

More graphs from Brian DeLong:

Because monetary policy is already tapped out--Treasury interest rates are at zero--and employment losses are about to be bigger than in any previous recession since the Great Depression itself.

Whatever the future will be, we're not going back to the way we were.

And then there's this video:

in response to the usual CSPAN hysterical caller, Rep Kanjorski gives his perspective on the bailout, it is especially interesting to hear how the money market drawdown threatened to collapse the entire world economy in 24 hours back in the fall of 2008, which was the motivation for the first 350 billion.

Pointing fingers:

The revolution was started by Chicago's first convert -- Richard Nixon in 1971. It was carried forward by the Reagan and Clinton administrations. Soon it became more profitable to grow money from money than to grow maize, textiles or steel.

Building up debts and deficits became acceptable. During the Bush-Cheney years the national debt doubled from $5.7 trillion to $10.7 trillion. 'Reagan proved ...deficits don't matter' said Dick Cheney in 2001.

Making money from money became the aim of economic policy. Chicago economists argued that private bankers could be trusted to create and distribute credit. That the US economy could safely be held aloft by a credit-fueled shopping spree. Shopping became the major economic activity.

Today the finance sector grabs more than 30% of domestic corporate profits -- double its share 25 years ago. And fully 75% of US GDP is down to personal consumption expenditures -- up from around 60% in the 1960s.

Today millions are jobless, homeless and hungry.

Then there's Robert Reich at TPM:



Paul Krugman:

Now, House and Senate negotiators have to reconcile their versions of the stimulus, and it’s possible that the final bill will undo the centrists’ worst. And Mr. Obama may be able to come back for a second round. But this was his best chance to get decisive action, and it fell short.

So has Mr. Obama learned from this experience? Early indications aren’t good.

For rather than acknowledge the failure of his political strategy and the damage to his economic strategy, the president tried to put a postpartisan happy face on the whole thing. “Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate and responded appropriately to the urgency this moment demands,” he declared on Saturday, and “the scale and scope of this plan is right.”

No, they didn’t, and no, it isn’t.

I think I'm going to go bury some gold in the backyard....

Demand it.

Yes, we do.

Now. Do it NOW.

President Barack Obama:

Every day, our economy gets sicker -- and the time for a remedy that puts Americans back to work, jump-starts our economy and invests in lasting growth is now.

Now is the time to protect health insurance for the more than 8 million Americans at risk of losing their coverage and to computerize the health-care records of every American within five years, saving billions of dollars and countless lives in the process.

Now is the time to save billions by making 2 million homes and 75 percent of federal buildings more energy-efficient, and to double our capacity to generate alternative sources of energy within three years.

Now is the time to give our children every advantage they need to compete by upgrading 10,000 schools with state-of-the-art classrooms, libraries and labs; by training our teachers in math and science; and by bringing the dream of a college education within reach for millions of Americans.

And now is the time to create the jobs that remake America for the 21st century by rebuilding aging roads, bridges and levees; designing a smart electrical grid; and connecting every corner of the country to the information superhighway.

These are the actions Americans expect us to take without delay. They're patient enough to know that our economic recovery will be measured in years, not months. But they have no patience for the same old partisan gridlock that stands in the way of action while our economy continues to slide.

So we have a choice to make. We can once again let Washington's bad habits stand in the way of progress. Or we can pull together and say that in America, our destiny isn't written for us but by us. We can place good ideas ahead of old ideological battles, and a sense of purpose above the same narrow partisanship. We can act boldly to turn crisis into opportunity and, together, write the next great chapter in our history and meet the test of our time.

Just take note of those who think playing politics is better than actually doing the job they were elected to do: working for us. Take note, take names and vote.

You have the right to be worried

If Paul Krugman is worried:

I’ve been ruminating over economic prospects for next year, and I’m getting scared.

Two points:

1. The economy is falling fast. We’ll see what tomorrow’s employment report says, but we could well be losing jobs at a rate of 450,000 or 500,000 a month.

2. Infrastructure spending will take time to get going — a new Goldman Sachs report suggests that projects that are “shovel-ready” are probably only a few tens of billions worth, and that a larger effort would take much of a year to get going. Meanwhile, it’s very questionable how much effect tax rebates will have on consumer demand. So it may be hard for stimulus to get much traction until late 2009 — and that’s even if Congress goes along, which may be a problem given all the bad analysis and disinformation out there.

So here’s what I’m wondering: will it, in fact, even be possible to pull the economy out of its nosedive before unemployment goes into double digits? I’m starting to wonder.

More wars and less jobs!