Last week I noted that Mitt Romney — insipid, empathy-free, and a congenital liar — was a gift from the gods to the Barack Obama re-election campaign. But even the gift of Romney won’t help Obama if he continues to campaign as if that alone will get him re-elected. More here.
Category: The New Depression
Structural unemployment
Krugman and Spitzer
On our economy.
8.1%
I gotta say, I’m hearing about people getting hired now. And I’m seeing a lot more job openings, so something’s happening:
The unemployment rate dropped a notch to 8.1 percent in April, the Labor Department reported on Friday, but the pace of job growth has fallen off, amid other signs that the economic recovery is losing momentum.
The economy added 115,000 payroll jobs in April, a meager showing compared with earlier this year when the jobs tally was rising at twice that rate.
The number of unemployed people in the United States declined to 12.5 million in April from 12.7 million the month before.
But at least part of the reason behind that decline in the number of unemployed is that many people decided to stop looking for for job: The labor force, defined as the number of people working or seeking work, declined by 342,000, Labor Department said.
The number of long-term unemployed, those who’ve been out of work for 27 weeks or more, was little changed at 5.1 million in April. That group makes up more than 40 percent of the jobless rolls.
Of course, there’s still this.
Clinton’s disastrous assumption
Somebody at Truthdig was pondering the growing gap between rich and poor in America and, not coincidentally, thought of the 1996 State of the Union address, in which Bill Clinton “kneecapped Franklin Delano Roosevelt” by declaring that the era of big government was over. More here.
Gloomy but accurate
I don’t know what to make of Chris Hedges. His social critiques often seem to lead to dead ends — to the conclusion that we might as well jump off a cliff and be done with it. But he’s a serious Occupy Wall Street supporter, and here and there in his gloom-ridden sermons are passages that make perfect sense:
The conflation of technological advancement with human progress leads to self-worship. Reason makes possible the calculations, science and technological advances of industrial civilization, but reason does not connect us with the forces of life. A society that loses the capacity for the sacred, that lacks the power of human imagination, that cannot practice empathy, ultimately ensures its own destruction. The Native Americans understood there are powers and forces we can never control and must honor. They knew, as did the ancient Greeks, that hubris is the deadliest curse of the human race. This is a lesson that we will probably have to learn for ourselves at the cost of tremendous suffering.
Oh look
Iceland said no to austerity and paying for the bankers, and now their economy’s booming.
I wonder if there’s a connection.
Oh dear
Wall Street to lay off at least 21K workers. That’s a lot of job losses for one city to absorb.
Ho boy
Property taxes have needed reassessing in Philadelphia for a very long time, because in many parts of the city, they are wildly undervalues. But doing it in the middle of a depression when so many people are already hurting seems like a really stupid idea.
Shorter David Cameron
“Baby, it wasn’t my fault!”