Your daily dose of economic sunshine and smiles

Robert Reich is a Cal professor, former Harvard professor, a former Labor secretary, and all around expert on various economic and labor policies. He also comes in a handy pocket size. He brings you good news: our long national nightmare is over.... the rich are rich again and corporations are raking in money hand over fist. I'm sure that will trickle down to the rest of us any day now.

Second-quarter earnings reports are coming in, and they’re making Wall Street smile. Corporate profits are up. And big American companies are sitting on a gigantic pile of money. The 500 largest non-financial firms held almost a trillion dollars in the second quarter, and that money pile is growing larger this quarter. Profits that plummeted in the recession have bounced back. Big businesses have recovered almost 90 percent of what they lost.

So with all this money and profit, they’ll start hiring again, right? Wrong

He gives many reasons. Namely, they're using money to expand overseas operations not US ones, they invest money in labor saving technologies not payroll expanding ones, the money is also being used to pay out stock dividends, buy up stock, and inflate stock prices, spite, they'll totally get around to it but it slipped their mind, spite, Chinese work cheap, they totally would but American workers are untrustworthy, they got bailed out so they didn't have to hire back US workers, and spite.

He concludes that this is a long term trend and that big US corporations may never rehire large numbers of American workers. He calls it "the great decoupling of company profits from jobs." It doesn't have much of a ring to it, but it's more academic sounding than "It's hobo grade beans and cardboard boxes for life, you poor, poor bastards."

So in case you got it into your head that the increase in stability and cash flow for businesses meant that a recovery is just around the corner, don't hold your breath. It's a bounce back for them, not everyone else. They don't call it a jobless recovery for nothing. But let's just take some time out of being spiteful and not having jobs to be happy for them and the cheap Chinese workforce they've replaced everyone with. Don't be bitter, they've moved on and found someone else. We'll console each other on unrequited love in the soup lines.

Old men with beards would like to scare you about the economy

Emperor of the Economy and Grand Vichy of Loose Change, Ben Bernanke, gathered the Justice League of Economics Professors and Financial Sector Giants known as the Fed together to issue a proclamation: we're all going to die from lack of money. Extreme exposure to lack of cash elements so harsh that our bodies and minds won't be able to handle it. Oh sure, you may have your foolish optimism or some notion that "this can't happen in America", but they have charts, scholarly analysis, and beards. Oh do they have beards.

Break it to us softly, wizened elders.

Members of the Federal Reserve lowered their expectations for economic growth and raised their projections of the nation's unemployment rate, cautioning for the first time in recent memory that the low employment rate "over the next several years... would likely be below levels they consider to be consistent" with their mandate to maximize employment, according to meeting minutes released Wednesday.
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A review of minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee meetings dating back to September 2008 -- the height of the financial crisis -- reveal no other meetings in which central bank policymakers expressed such a dim view of the unemployment rate. While the minutes have expressed such caution regarding the expected inflation rate, they have not indicated that the low level of employment would be so low as to threaten their legal mandate to pursue those policies that maximize employment.

Hmm, not to nitpick while you're dropping sadness bombs, but that "mandate to maximize employment"? Yeah, that doesn't seem like something you've been too serious about over these past few years. Or ever. Yeah. You seemed to be more interested in chasing the invisible inflation dragon. See, inflation rate-> remains tame, employment rate-> DEAR GOD I CAN'T LOOK IT BURNS MY EYES!

It's nice that you pretend care about the poors and their field tilling jobs now, but it would have been appreciated during the Wall Street money orgy you were presiding over when other smart people who weren't in you special club with the offices that smell of rich mahogany were yelling bloody murder about the increasing jobless rates.

Ahh, I'm just being mean because the economy is going to be awful for a decade or more. It's not your fault, Fed guys. You have your limited set of tools and those typically do the job. But not when things are this bad and not when we have an entire branch of government that has abdicated it's duties in favor of intermittently squabbling amongst themselves and attempting to pull the country down on itself for political gain. Thanks for the concern.

Jobblog

As These Bastards is the foremost economics blog on the web, it is our duty to bring you the most cutting edge economic theories going. Mostly these have to do with the flagging job market where there are somewhere in the neighborhood of five applicants for every opening.

Now most of the new economic theories from our elected betters seemed to stem from them plugging their ears and yelling "Get a job anyway you lazy wretches, stop freeloading on the less than $12 grand a year in unemployment you would be theoretically getting if we in Congress could ever pass a jobs bill. You're all probably on drugs." You know, America's lazy peasant problem.

So we feel it's necessary to highlight any new solutions to our joblessness problem, for you: the unemployed hobo reading this while eating a tin of beans underneath a highway underpass. Don't deny it; we know that's 90% of our audience. We have the Google Metrics.

First up is Minnesota GOP candidate for governor Tom Emmer, who is chuffed that some bitch waitress expected a tip last night after she slowly delivered drinks that the asshole bartender was watering down.

Tom Emmer, the GOP-endorsed candidate for governor, told reporters at the Eagle Street Grille in St. Paul on Monday that the minimum wage for service workers who earn tips should be cut. Some waiters and bartenders, he noted, can earn as much as $100,000 a year, which he said is unfair to the employers that hire them.
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Minnesota is one of few states that does not follow the federal minimum wage for tip-earners — $2.13 an hour. Instead, tip-earners make $5.25 to $7.25 an hour in addition to tips. Emmer says that hurts businesses’ bottom lines.

“Government can only inhibit business, can only keep it from growing, as opposed to creating jobs,” he said. “Right now, we have too much of it, guys. We’ve got to pull government back.”

I know. This economy would be right back on track if bartending and waitressing, two of the most lucrative and desirable jobs in America, nay, the world, we treated like the slave labor they were. I'm tired of these six figure waitresses killing businesses with their minimum wage salaries. Hasn't anyone ever heard of being grateful to be allowed inside an air conditioned building for a ten hour shift? Maybe you repay that shelter from the elements by serving a few drinks or a club sandwich or two without collapsing the world economy. Is that to much to ask, waitresses?

By the way, I'm going to need you to split this check.

On the other hand, potentially crazy... you know, what, I'm going to drop the "potentially" part. Crazy Democratic South Carolina U.S. Senate candidate Alvin Greene has another plan to help revive the job market. By employing people in what I'm sure is the seriously flagging Alvin Greene doll making industry.

"Another thing we can do for jobs is make toys of me, especially for the holidays. Little dolls. Me. Like maybe little action dolls. Me in an army uniform, air force uniform, and me in my suit. They can make toys of me and my vehicle, especially for the holidays and Christmas for the kids. That's something that would create jobs. So you see I think out of the box like that. It's not something a typical person would bring up. That's something that could happen, that makes sense. It's not a joke."

That is outside the box. Like outside of a padded box after the dose of medication they gave you didn't have any effect, then you overpowered seven guards before throwing a water fountain through the window, climbing out, and running to freedom. Luckily the reporter was able to finish the interview without being skinned and Alvin using his face as a mask.

So there you have it, the solutions to our problems: stop tipping rich waitresses and start making dolls of a weird Senate candidate. We'll be back on our feet in no time.

Cheap Blogging Crutch 07.02

Zombie Meat. For when you want a blue peppered jerky snack that makes it seem like you're eating the flesh on a re-animated dead body.

In America Has An Awful News industry news, Adam Serwer goes into detail about how waterboarding moved from being "clearly torture" to "erm..... *clears throat, tugs at collar* a matter.... of.. debate?" in the New York Times during the Bush Administration because of politics and GOP messaging. It turns out that high level journalistic arts requires giving credence to both sides of an issue, even if there aren't two sides and one is just craven ass-covering.

Think Progress compiles a list of Senators who not only have successfully blocked extending unemployment benefits, pretty much the least thing we can do to combat the bad job market, but have also essentially helped block doing anything substantial about jobs. What's so great about this list? They all come from states with double digit unemployment that is much higher than the national average. Hey, when you're trying to sink the economy further to help your electoral prospects in November, you can't be concerned with little things like people or people who elected you.

Now we know why Arizona had to enact that Walking While Latino law. Apparently there are roving gangs of crazed illegal immigrants decapitating law abiding citizens. So says Governor Jan Brewer. Some liberals, media types, Latino groups, and people with common sense say that this is a completely fabricated lie intended to scaremonger about the Mexicanos, but I don't know; illegal Latin guillotine gangs sounds so plausible. Maybe this is a new breed of Mexican coming here searching for a job and a head (or cabesa as they call it). No dice, Pablo, those jobs and heads are ours.

Scientists believe they have found the earliest known form of complex cellular life: weird scallop things that are 2.1 billion years old. Do you know how they figure out how old the organism was? It was carrying an ancient bible and they just added up all the ages of the people inside it.

The Amazing Kreskin has offered up his services to the Pittsburgh Pirates, saying that unless they hire him they'll continue to lose for at least two more years and he'd offer his help to stop their 18-year losing streak. Unless Kreskin can go a solid 7 every five days and keep his ERA under 3 or has some serious gap power, I don't think he can do much for us. Unless he has no ethical qualms about hypnotizing Bob Nutting into committing suicide. Plus, the Bucs would never hire him; they can't lowball him in arbitration or trade him for several middling mentalist prospects.

In Rich People Have Too Much Money news, a Russian billionaire has commissioned an Australian goldsmith to create a $21,000 golden diamond encrusted vuvuzela. *dusts hands off* God, send the meteors, I think we've clearly bottomed out as a society.

Your government at work

It's been a long held contention of this blog that the US Senate is where all things good and intelligent go to be made stupid and awful, slowly strangled in an abandoned alley by a cackling horde of willfully negligent septuagenarian bastards. And that's our opinion on a positive day. This can largely be seen in nearly any and all debate on matters of national importance, but is almost always most clearly seen during debates and bills dealing with the attempted economic recovery.

I mean unemployment is only at 10% and it's looking like we're going to enter an entire lost decade of growth.... so who needs to treat any of this with any amount of seriousness? The Senate GOP can keep trying to pull the country down on top of itself with procedural stalling and Senate Democrats can actually be the first group of people in history to die of a thousand self-inflicted paper cuts.

Oh sure, the House has it's moments of horrid futility and stupidity explosions -like, say, when they're attempting to cut growth by $50 billion and cost this country 300,000 jobs in a myopic, ineffective, back-patting, meaningless snit about the deficit- but the Senate really takes the cake when combining large scale inaction and ineffectiveness with small scale fuck yous so petty that they should be delivered by 13 year old girls in text message form. Take the jobs bill the Senate is currently half-assing:

Senate Democrats are exploring whether to eliminate an extra $25 a week in unemployment benefits, part of the economic stimulus legislation passed in 2009, as a way to cut costs and attract Republican votes for a stalled package of tax breaks, tax increases on the affluent and safety-net spending.

Top officials said that change would save billions of dollars over the next six months and could lead to approval of an overall extension of jobless pay by making the legislative package easier to swallow for lawmakers worried about deficit spending.

Now they're just chintzing a couple of bucks out of people so that they can better pass a collection of half-measures that fails to fully address the actual problems this country is experiencing. And they actually want you to believe that knocking $25 bucks out of unemployment benefits is going to make people opposed to actions that might help an actual person, flip head over heels about the prospects of extending the entire program for another couple of months. But hey, I'm sure the deficit hawks and the Blue Dogs will feel good about the minuscule impact they had on the deficit when we're in year ten of a recession. I'm sure taking $25 bucks from the unemployed in the worst economic crisis since the Depression will get those people back on their feet and the economy back in shape in no time.

At least the Roll Down the Window of Your Bentley and Spit At Poor People In the Street Act is stalled in committee.

This post was written by one of our unpaid interns

There is no secret that Sean and I love unpaid interns. They're what makes TB Industries go. They shovel coal into the blast furnaces during their 19 hour shifts, they mine coal for the blast furnace, they burn as an acceptable form of fuel failing a timely delivery of coal or mine cave-in, they are excellent cannon fodder for our top-secret assaults on small island nations we need to control before we can enact Plan Beta, they go good with a white wine vinaigrette and provide an excellent source of protein, they seem to fight the genetic abominations our science department cranks out with a certain pluckiness and aplomb when they're armored up and forced into the Hellpit, and, most importantly, they're easily replaceable, their bodies are easily dumpable, and their causes of death are easy to cover up.

But for most recent grads, becoming an unpaid intern isn't a choice one makes just to become part of the greater glory of These Bastards. No, for most it is an opportunity, any opportunity, to grab some form of job experience during the worst job market ever. For most companies they offer unpaid internships for one reason: slavery is a good business model. But now it seems that old man socialism and the feddy government want to stick their noses into this racket and make sure it conforms to "laws" and "accepted labor practices". Fascists.

Convinced that many unpaid internships violate minimum wage laws, officials in Oregon, California and other states have begun investigations and fined employers. Last year, M. Patricia Smith, then New York’s labor commissioner, ordered investigations into several firms’ internships. Now, as the federal Labor Department’s top law enforcement official, she and the wage and hour division are stepping up enforcement nationwide.
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The Labor Department says it is cracking down on firms that fail to pay interns properly and expanding efforts to educate companies, colleges and students on the law regarding internships.
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Ms. Leppink said many employers failed to pay even though their internships did not comply with the six federal legal criteria that must be satisfied for internships to be unpaid. Among those criteria are that the internship should be similar to the training given in a vocational school or academic institution, that the intern does not displace regular paid workers and that the employer “derives no immediate advantage” from the intern’s activities — in other words, it’s largely a benevolent contribution to the intern.

It goes without saying that the "six federal legal criteria", or "The Forbidden Restraints" as we call them here, are not allowed to be written or spoken of. Punishment for this industry killing knowledge is the filling in of the perpetrator's mouth with cement.

But our industry (blogging/the Onion wake swimming/megalomaniacal world domination/pointless furnace maintenance) is not like other industries. So for those recent graduates who do not wish to become part of the TB Killer Elite, this might be relevant information to have.

I mean sure the rise in de facto slavery and skirting labor, harassment, and discrimination laws through internships is a troubling response to a massive economic crisis, but how did you expect America to get back on top? By employing people, using sound business practices, and enacting laws, regulations, and programs that promote sensible growth and prevent this kind of thing from happening again? No, of course not. This is America after all.

So best of wishes to the new unpaid interns out there. Good news, in addition to the job experience you'll be able to put on a resume, this also qualifies as "Studying the labor and economic policies of Dubai". Congratulations, you just got a Social Sciences minor!

Get a job: destroying the country edition

Sure, no one has a job and the Senate's decision to push off health care to put a laser like focus on jobs hasn't resulted in jobs, jobs bills passing, or, at the very least, a cool laser display possibly set to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. But thankfully the census is upon us.

I know what you're saying: "Isn't the census a tool to increase slavery, just like Glenn Beck claims or just a pretext to internment and re-education camps like Michelle Bachmann says?" Yes, yes it is. Especially the slavery thing. But it is also a roaring jobs creator that will mask the ongoing economic horrors for a little while.

The U.S. Census Bureau expects to add up to 750,000 workers to its payroll by May, a hiring binge that could knock the unemployment rate down by as much as a half-point.

The once-a-decade census is coming at the best possible time for President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats, who have taken political lumps for more than a year over a jobless rate that stands at 9.7 percent.
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“This is the best-timed census you could ever dream of,” said Heidi Shierholz, who tracks the labor market at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. She believes the March unemployment report will show the economy added jobs instead of subtracting them.

Whoo-hoo! A once a decade temporary jobs to mask our anemic job creation! Temporary jobs for everyone! Everything is fixed. Cancel those jobs bills, they weren't going to pass anyway.

Now of course you're all worried about the slavery thing and the re-education camp thing, not to mention the whole "ACORN" angle, how it's all a front to steal your property, indoctrinate your children, prep for a UN invasion, target undesirables for predator drone attacks, a White House power grab, and an illegal immigrant takeover. But to this I say: wouldn't you rather be on the inside, perpetrating these simultaneous coups, attacks, and invasions from disparate groups, then be subject to them? I know I would.

So if you need a job and perhaps want to facilitate Ban Ki-Moon's takeover of the contiguous United States, then may I suggest taking a job with the US Census. It's really the only job that's going to be created in the next year. Happy interring and predator drone bombing!

Chart of the day

The Calculated Risk blog takes time out of their busy day to catalogue for us just how far up shit creek this economy is and to the extent with which our paddle has been rendered into unusable splinters that have floated out of reach from our desperately clawing hands as the boat we're in takes on shit and we slowly sink into the shit depths.

Enjoy the weekend!

Get a job

I am not an economist. I think that much has been made clear by my blinkered bafflement with even the most basic of numbers. It's even in my official title: Brutal Overlord of the Northern Hemisphere, Direct Conduit to God, Party Chip and Dip Specialist, and Chief Non-Economist of These Bastards. But even I had to notice something bizarre with the jobs numbers. More people lost their jobs... but the unemployment and underemployment numbers went down. Guh?

The United States economy shed 20,000 jobs in January, the government said Friday, deepening concern that relief from the deepest economic downturn in a generation would be slow to come. But even as the economy struggled to start creating jobs again, the unemployment rate fell to 9.7 percent from 10 percent in December.

As the broader economy gains steam and crucial sectors like manufacturing spring back to life, analysts say the recovery appears to be intact. But the nation’s stubbornly high unemployment rate remains a persistent thorn in the side of optimists, and economists expect the situation to worsen before it gets better.
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Many more Americans, even those with jobs, are feeling the pinch. The underemployment rate, which counts people who have given up looking for work and those who are working part-time because of a lack of full-time positions, rose for much of last year. In January, it touched 16.5 percent, down from 17.3 percent in December.

It think I have it figured out: it has to do with alternate timelines, a seemingly evil timeless being made of smoke impersonating another man, a secret island existing outside of time and space, and wizards. Don't forget about the wizards.

Lesser wizard Paul Krugman explains that economics in general and the jobs numbers especially are all just a meaningless, confusing crapshoot and that nothing concrete can ever be drawn for the pointless void of numbers and math with which he has devoted his life to. OK, maybe he didn't say that, but he did say that these numbers were derived from multiple surveys and only rough indicators of economic strength. Yes yes, an endless nothing, existence is meaningless... we get it, Paul.

So what next? Will we shed more jobs while unemployment still falls? Will a discernible human ever get a new job in this country? Will these numbers spur or slow our elected betters in the Senate to actually start up on that jobs bill thing that they just had to kill health care reform in order to get to? Or are we all just going to continue to slog through a middling economy with 10% employment as nothing is done to improve the situation of actual Americans and we permanently teeter on the brink of total collapse? According to most economists, it's that last one. Oh well, good luck finding a job! It theoretically got easier, supposedly.

Health care: run away!

It should be of little surprise, really. It was expected. I don't know why I thought that this time might be different. Health care reform is effectively dead for a while, which might just mean it is effectively dead. Why? Because Democrats have decided to assume their familiar position, one of grabbed ankles, pants around ankles, and a look that says "don't harm the plumbing too much back there." The Senate feels the health care issue, namely putting through reconciliation measures they were already going to vote for, to be too extreme a measure. Why? Because they can apparently see a future where not passing health care reform was a great idea.

So instead, because they can't do more than one thing at a time and literally every Senator is going to be working on this new priority, they've decided to pivot from health care to anything that anyone will throw at them in order to plausibly provide them with an excuse to get them away from health care. That thing is jobs, which they've decided is kind of important now after a year of not doing anything about it.

The White House on Thursday signaled the outlines of its strategy for breaking the partisan logjam holding up President Obama’s agenda, saying Democrats would move quickly to underline their commitment to fixing the broken economy and to build an election-year case against Republicans if they do not cooperate.

With Mr. Obama’s health care overhaul stalled on Capitol Hill, Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said in an interview that Democrats would try to act first on job creation, reducing the deficit and imposing tighter regulation on banks before returning to the health measure, the president’s top priority from last year.

Yes yes, sure sure, good good. I'm sure the Republicans will hop on board to help you with an important priority. If there's one thing we've learned about the GOP it's that they certainly aren't interested in yanking the country down on itself if there's a slight chance it'll benefit them politically. Gee I wonder how the first attempt at this this year, where you tried to pass a measure the GOP supported, namely pay-as-you-go rules for the budget? What, they opposed in en masse? Including several GOP Senators who explicitly expressed support for the measure? Shocking.

I wonder what there contribution to the jobs debate will be. How does the New York Times phrase it? "[I]nstant Republican resistance to the jobs plan", a jobs plan which hasn't even been articulated. I'm sure this will go well.

So good job, Democrats. I'm sure that running shrieking from health care to the issue of jobs, because two things at once is hard, is going to work out for you. Hell, I foresee a future where both health care reform and an actual, working jobs bill are passed with enough time to be enacted before the election. The election being your only real concern at this point. This, like all your plans and legislative strategies, will totally work. Why shouldn't people trust you? You're the Democrats! Things things always go well for you and, by extension, the American people.

..........Growth?

U.S. Economy Grew at Fastest Pace in 6 Years Last Quarter

The United States economy grew at its fastest pace in over six years at the end of 2009, but a sluggish job market is still souring economists on the sustainability of the recovery.

Gross domestic product expanded at an annual rate of 5.7 percent in the fourth quarter, well above analysts’ expectations. It had grown at an annualized rate of 2.2 percent in the previous quarter. Analysts had forecast annualized growth of 4.8 percent in the quarter, and the better-than-expected result sent stocks higher when trading opened on Wall Street.

“It was excellent report, but it’s not clear how sustainable this pace of growth is,” said John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics. “We need numbers like this for the next two years, and I just don’t think we can achieve that.”

What the hell? 5.7%? That's like... a real number. The kind of number you need to see to start believing we might actually stave off of our impending dystopian hobo future. Things are looking good. No, things are looking great. Gentlemen, dust off the spats, shine up the monocle, order that gold toilet you've been eying, and... wait, I found the rainy cloud for this parade.

Seems that the reason for the growth is that businesses were replenishing stocks and inventory that had been allowed to dwindle because of the recession. Actual growth, not taking into account this unsustainable blip, was 2.2%. I think the phrase of the day you want to learn is: "inventory bounce". Why are some economists looking at this 5.7% number, looking at the inventory bounce/blip and saying "...ehhhhh"? Well because other economic indicators are poor, namely the jobs market.

Once again we've learned one of the fundamental lessons of this recovery: as long as you are an abstract number representing our economy and not someone actually living within the economy, things are looking good for you.

So there was this speech thing last night

Last night the President gave his State of the Union and the response seem to be pretty good. The speech was so good that Chris Matthews forgot Barack Obama was black for an hour. Me? I forgot the President was half white for an hour, then I forgot I was black for a half hour, remembered that I'm lily white for the other half hour, acutely remembered the religion and ethnicity of everyone I know for an hour, and then forgot who the supporting cast in the Godfather Part II was. I still can't remember.

It was a long speech, long on optimism, quick with mocking humor, and took numerous opportunities to chastise the shitty legislature, the problems he inherited, and the fact that nobody seems to want to do anything to address them. Here are some of the more buzzworthy lines from the speech. The TB consensus favorite was this:

"At the beginning of the last decade, America had a budget surplus of over $200 billion. By the time I took office, we had a one year deficit of over $1 trillion and projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade. Most of this was the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program. On top of that, the effects of the recession put a $3 trillion hole in our budget. That was before I walked in the door."

A completely true statement about the absolute horrowshow he was handed, which also triggered another running theme of the evening: human blights on the country mouthing bullshit when the cameras were on them.

But what were the themes of the evening? Jobs... and jobs, and jobs, and jobs, and jobs. Why? No one has one. Barry also took the time out to pledge and urge support for passing health care in the vague, nonspecific way that has been so infuriating during the health debate. He wants Congress to trust in the recovery path he put this country on, threatened to veto financial reform if it's the festering pile of lobbyist bullshit we all know it will be, ordered his party to get some balls, and offered up that maybe we should let gays serve in the military.

That's all good and well, but if good speeches that were very popular with the American people got things done, we'd have decent health care, smart regulatory reforms, action on climate change, decent bailouts and stimulus plans passed, and the country wouldn't be the shithole that it is. But as we've learned over the past year; talk is cheap, and so is owning a lawmaker. Well, cheap relative to the cost of what they can do for you by stalling, killing, or weakening laws. For all the good ideas, smart words, and big plans Obama has, they still have to go through the fiery crucible of stupid that is the US Senate and the lesser stupidity of the House.

So, Mr. President... yeah, good luck with all of that. I'll believe it when I see it. Still, nicely delivered and thought out. It's that implementation thing we're all still waiting on.

Get a job

Well the new employment stats are in and yes, we lost more jobs again and the economic outlook appears grim. Or should I say "still appears grim". The economy shed 85,000 jobs, unemployment stayed at 10%, the workforce dropped by 661,000 as people quit looking for jobs, underemployment rose to 17.3%, and I accidentally made eye contact with a homeless man on Grant Street. It was totally awkward.

But lost in all the whinging about "Oooh the misery" and "I can't feed my family" and "I have no money" and "When I look at my husband his head morphs into a delicious looking roast turkey and I start comically salivating" is this bit of good news:

The latest monthly snapshot of the national job market released by the Labor Department on Friday provided one potentially encouraging milestone: Data for November was revised to show that the economy gained 4,000 net jobs that month, in contrast to initial reports showing a loss of 11,000 jobs. That marked the first monthly improvement since the recession began two years ago.

Yeah, that's right: at some point in this miserable economy, an actual net job was created. I'll break out the fine china, you call the specialty snooty foods store to see if they have a pallet of beluga caviar and toast points sitting in the back. Now I know 4,000 doesn't sound like a lot of jobs. But if you were to think of it in terms of Single A minor league baseball attendance, you'd be thrilled. Especially if you didn't have to throw a bobble head or fireworks night to get that many people through the turnstiles.

Unfortunately we at the These Bastards Economic Analysis and Financial Services Weapons Depot have talked to some of our sources in the Department of Labor and have been told that the 4,000 jobs created number will be revised downwards next month. There's still job creation, but it's being revised to only one actual job that was created. So we'd like to congratulate last month's lucky job recipient, one Phyllis Walden of Boise, Idaho who was hired as a cashier at the local CostCo. Congratulations on your achievement and please accept our solemn condolences in recognition of the fact that you lost that job this month.

Ah well Phyllis, maybe you'll get it back next month. Though, to be realistic, probably more like early 2011 if current economic predictions hold. Hope you can hold out until then.

Chart of the day

The Washington Post brings us this little nugget of post decade statistical reflection. The past decade was the worst for jobs... in the last seven decades. Take heart in the fact that the only reason that they aren't willing to say "worst job growth in the history of the United States of Freemerica" is because the Great Depression existed. That's a kind of good news... isn't it?

Anyway, just think of all the stories of hardship you'll be able to tell your grandkids. Instead of tales about walking up a hill to go to school (both ways) you'll be able to show them charts and complex statistical comparisons proving that point. Kids love stats and graphs, right?

Showing us who's the boss

Yesterday we heard from Larry Summers, talking about how, in the end, Wall Street will do what's right for the American people because "we were there for them." Well, that statement also happened to coincide with a meeting the President was having with the major heads of financial corporations on things like executive compensation, new regulations, and lending. Thankfully, a few of our financial betters decided to show just how thankful they were.

President Obama didn’t exactly look thrilled as he stared at the Polycom speakerphone in front of him. “Well, I appreciate you guys calling in,” he began the meeting at the White House with Wall Street’s top brass on Monday.

He was, of course, referring to the three conspicuously absent attendees who were being piped in by telephone: Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs; John J. Mack, chairman of Morgan Stanley; and Richard D. Parsons, chairman of Citigroup.

Their excuse? “Inclement weather,” according to the White House. More precisely, fog delayed flights into Reagan National Airport.

Awww, fog. Shame there isn't a high speed rail system connecting the two cities, just as it's also a shame that the fog was only bad enough for those three not to make it out of New York.I guess there just wasn't a sense of urgency, seeing as they weren't going to be getting any more billions in return for showing up.

On the bright side, they are saying there has to be major financial reforms. Sure, the armies of lobbyists they pay and their Congressional toadies are saying something else, but the CEO's are pretending really hard. In the end, isn't that repayment enough? Isn't putting up a thin candy shell of humility, gratitude, and claims that you're ready to act like humans again "doing what's right'? It'll just makes the loophole riddled bill that Congress passes and Wall Street loves easier to swallow. Imagine how hard that bill would be to take if these CEO's acted likes assholes the entire way through the process?

Next time make more of an effort to catch a plane: it makes it easier for us to pretend you care. Our psyches are fragile enough as it is, what with lending dried up and no jobs. We need some phony showmanship, so we can at least pretend we got something out of the global financial apocalypse. Can't you at least give us that?

Get a job

Jobs are on the agenda again. Why? Because it's either talk about jobs, talk about the disappointing Senate bullshit going on with health care, talking about future disappointing Senate bullshit with regards to Copenhagen and climate legislation, or talk about Sarah Palin's book. Clearly jobs are the only recourse for retaining some level of sanity.

President Obama is concerned about jobs, which is why he's going to give a major speech today outlining help for highways and small businesses, bridges and energy-efficient homes as avenues for action, funding avenues, using leftover/repaid funds from the surprisingly efficient TARP fund to pay down the debt or small business lending, and other various options for maybe getting unemployment under 10% sometime before we have to stop trying to come up with a grouping name for this decade (the aughts?) and come up with one for the next decade (the teens...plus some others?). But don't worry, dear readers, Obama isn't the only one concerned about jobs, the GOP clearly has an alternative and concrete plan for success that they want you to know about. They unveiled it at the Economist's World in 2010 Conference.

DANIEL FRANKLIN: What is the big idea? “Jobs” is not an idea.

ERIC CANTOR: The big idea is to get, to get, to produce an environment where we can have job creation again. And see, that’s where the Obama administration’s agenda so clearly disadvantages the Democrats in this upcoming election in eleven months and advantages us.

Stupid guy from the Economist, saying 'jobs' is a plan and saying 'produce an environment where we can have job creation', perhaps through magic, is a specific plan. They're for 'jobs', what more do you want? For them to actually support job creating plans like the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act or a newer, more specifically targeted towards jobs plan? For them to stop openly relishing the fact that poor jobs numbers a year from now and the complete stalling of any attempted action will benefit them politically? Madness.

So don't worry, Jobless-Americans, Eric Cantor has a notion that jobs are important and that you should probably have one. That idea won't move any further than that, so I hope that his positive thoughts on that and a good economy helped you find work.

11k

Good news everyone, the job losses last month were so low that they were able to print all their names in the paper. So we would like to offer our condolences to Freddie Wallace of Dubuke, Harriet Sanderson of Portland, and Dick Jauron of Buffalo.

Just kidding, 11,000 people lost their jobs, which puts us into another one of those 'bad news is good news' type situations where a decrease in losses is a positive. But it is nice to see our economy move from shedding jobs at a "10 NFL stadiums full of people" clip to a "1 minor league hockey arena" area. Also, in a development that shows me how I don't understand how the unemployment numbers work, that 11k job loss actually resulted in the unemployment rate dropping to 10%. We're inching towards the employment levels of a 1st world country again!

In the strongest jobs report since the recession began, the government reported Friday that the nation’s employers had all but stopped shedding jobs in November, taking some of the pressure off of President Obama to come up with a jobs creation program.
...
The government also significantly revised September and October numbers. September was adjusted to show a loss of 139,000 jobs instead of 219,000, and October 111,000 instead of 190,000.
...
“We’re moving toward stability in the labor market and the end of the tremendous firing that has plagued America,” said Allen L. Sinai, the founder of Decision Economics, a research firm. “But it’s going to be bleak for years. While it is going to be better than what we’ve seen, it’s still going to be terrible.”

Allan Sinai everyone! That was an exquisite hope crushing. Still, I'm going to have to disagree with the article's observation that merely moving our employment numbers to "civil war torn eastern European/former Soviet satellite" levels probably isn't going to cause Barry to wipe the sweat off his brow and start plowing through that book off crossword puzzles he's been putting off. But, the news is slightly improving, with even the "I got my hours cut/I'm too discouraged to even look for work" epic misery numbers dropping from 17.5% to 17.2%.

So the possibility lies that in the next few months this economy might actually produce a job. It'll probably be a job as a human shield for Goldman-Sachs executives as they try to get to their luxury sedan without being hit by garbage or as a member of the Gruesome Suicide Clean-up Squad in one of our many economically depressed Midwestern cities, but it'll still be a job. So stay positive, in a month or so you could be that guy who takes a cabbage to the sternum to protect a well heeled Goldman executive from the indignity of contact with peasants and their peasant food. You'll be able to take that cabbage home to eat and you'll probably get to meet Matt Taibbi. Things are looking up for you.

Get a job

Today the much heralded Jobs Summit is taking place in Washington, in which our economic, business, financial, and academic elite all trudge to the White House to submit some resumes to Rahm Emanuel in the hope that someone, anyone, will hire them in this terrible, terrible job market. Also, maybe they'll discuss some ways to get the rest of the country employed. Maybe.

But there is one problem to doing any jobs-centric stimulus bill. One, of course, is that it has to get past the Senate. Secondly, is that it will actually cost money to do. This is not surprising to those of us who realize that wishes don't create jobs, but is apparently a big stumbling block for the White House. They're a little too concerned about phony deficit debates. As such, they're wringing their hands over the fact that they might actually have to spend money on *shudder* people.

Obama has summoned 130 corporate executives, economists, small-business owners and union leaders to the White House to sound out ideas for accelerating job growth during the worst labor market in a generation.
...
But Obama's options are limited, as the administration already has signaled that it is unwilling to make any investments that would add significantly to the nation's ballooning deficit.
...
It is far from clear that Obama will embrace all the ideas being promoted by his supporters in organized labor, who are making calls for direct funding of federal public works jobs, another round of aid to cash-strapped states and cities, and funding for infrastructure projects.

Taken together, those initiatives could cost hundreds of billions of dollars -- a tab Obama seems unwilling to shoulder. The White House has been warmer to ideas to use federal money to leverage private investments.

Let's recap. When Wall Street and banks are in trouble: "Dear God man, this is a catastrophe of epic proportions! Get out the checkbook and start handing out blank checks. No cost is too high, no expense will be spared!"

When unemployment rates are over 10% and showing no signs of improving: "Riiiiiiiight. Are you sure there's not some job creating machine that we already built, that we just can't turn on now? No? Yeah....I think it's time we had a little talk about fiscal responsibility and potential increases in theoretical debt payments decades down the line. I'd inside-out my pockets to mime being broke, but these pants are pretty expensive and you aren't supposed to do that to them. Go away now."

Finally, nearly two years into this collapse, someone finally gets around to saying "Oh shit, what about the people who actually have to live in this country" and you all magically get concerned about deficits, and start spreading bullshit about debt and spending too much. What is the goal? Inaction on unemployment. But of course. Enjoy your jobs summit, I'm sure the theater of it will be lovely. You can pretend you're soliciting opinions from all these various new sources and then you'll just go back to listening to the same old ones that get tight when helping humans is mentioned. Ahh Washington, you never disappoint.

Broken In Brief: Obama offers up population surge to win hearts, minds in Afghanistan

WASHINGTON—Of the myriad reactions reverberating throughout the political world following President Obama’s Afghan War speech last evening, most are centered around the plan to immediately send an additional 30,000 troops to the region. But seemingly missing from this debate is any sort of reaction to the second tier of Obama’s new strategy, one in which upwards of 30 million Americans are permanently relocated to Afghanistan in an effort to conjure a more accommodating indigenous population.

The program, dubbed the Two Birds Project, would seek to alleviate two main problems facing the Obama Administration: first, the hostility of an Afghan population wary of more foreign soldiers and increased violence, and second, the double-digit American unemployment rate.

"Frankly it’s a win-win,” observed Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. “By flooding and doubling the Afghan population with American citizens, we will finally have popular support of a people that is welcoming to American interests. Plus, knocking 30 million off the jobless rolls will help America’s economic situation. Hell, considering most of those people can no longer afford health care, this program will drastically decrease the number of uninsured in the country to boot.”

Added Gates, “I fail to see how this could go wrong.”

For those that feel the culture shock would be too great in moving from America to Afghanistan, architects of the policy note that most of the unemployed come from the more economically and industrially shattered areas of the Midwest and, as such, will hardly notice the difference between Afghanistan’s sparsely populated areas, underdeveloped industry, poverty, and religious extremism from the types with which they are already familiar.

On a more psychological level, these "Amerafghanians" will no longer be forced to endure the horrendous torment of seeing vacant mills or shuttered factories dotting the landscape, as seeing as Afghanistan has virtually no manufacturing or industrial capacity in the first place.

As an added relocation bonus, those helpless individuals who have turned to drugs are bound to appreciate their newfound proximity to the world’s foremost narcotics pipeline, able to partake in that fresh-off-the-poppy heroin traditionally available only to the most affluent westerners.

Barring any complications, America hopes to have fobbed off 30 million of its dregs onto Afghanistan by the end of the 1st quarter next year.

Good news everyone!

The sadness monsters at the Fed have announced they're back again, hiding in your closet, waiting to spring out at the moment you're most vulnerable to scare you witless with some new grim economic prognostication. Take their actions today, the day before Thanksgiving. You know that awkward conversation you can't wait to have with the in-laws? You know, the one about how you haven't found a job and how tough the prospects are. Well....they're pretty sure you'll be having that conversation until at least 2012.

The unemployment rate will remain elevated for years to come, according to a forecast released Tuesday by the Federal Reserve that addresses for the first time economic conditions at the time of the next presidential election.

It paints a grim picture. Top Fed officials expect the unemployment rate to remain in the 6.8 to 7.5 percent range at the end of 2012 and said it could take "about five or six years" from now for economic activity to return to normal. The jobless rate was 10.2 percent in October.

But on the bright side: the stock market is over 10,000! Plus, GDP grew 3.5%! OK, they had to revise that down to 2.8%, but that's still growth! Why do you have to ruin all this good news with whining about how bad it is for you out there? Just go pick up your free charity turkey and shut up about not having a job. What's that? Demand for turkey's from charities is so high because of the recession that they're actually running out of them? *tugs at collar nervously* Ouch, tough room.

On the bright side, the job forecasts are so bad that even Democrats have taken notice, vowing action on a jobs bill...at some point. So hey, if they hurry on that, you can have something else to be immensely disappointed by for Christmas or New Years. Though, judging by the speed at which Congress acts, it'll be ready in time for St. Patty's. Luckily, by then no one will take your drinking problem for anything other than Irish holiday pride. See, the good news is piling up already!