Recovery Less Jobs

Gone are the days when a man or woman could step up bravely before his or her employer's big desk and declare, "Take this job and shove it." Long gone.

The latest unemployment figures are in, and they are not good. While the pace of firings by American companies has slowed to its lowest point in a couple of years, a sign that the tide is indeed turning, the jobless rate has climbed to 10.2 percent nationally.

Some would have you believe that this is somehow President Obama's fault. Yet the federal government has been just about the only entity to expand payroll this past year, and any junior economist can handily explain that employment is a lagging indicator when it comes to recovering from the kind of recession Obama's predecessor left us all in.

In fact, productivity is way up, meaning Big Business is happy to utilize fewer Americans to make their profits. Here in Arizona, the supermarket chain Fry's - which includes Safeway - is preparing to hire temporary workers, as it prepares for another round of good old-fashioned union busting.

Still, 10.2 percent, that's pretty high (and doesn't even come close to telling the story in places like Michigan), the highest it's been in 26 years. Some have been collecting unemployment compensation for nearly two years now. These figures reflect not only the number of workers who have given up - hey, wait a second.

Twenty-six years? Let's see, that would have been, well, it would've been 1983. So the last time this many Americans were suffering from joblessness, which really translates into hopelessness, Ronald Wilson Reagan was our president. And he was in his third year as such.

Funny how that works. Last year's gouging at the pump was the result of oil prices that broke all the records set in 1981... When Reagan was in office. The sub-prime collapse was the worst banking crisis since the S & L scandal of the late '80s... When Reagan was in office. The Dubya-era stock market swoons were the worst since 1987... When Reagan was in office.

Let's face it. There is no question that Ronald Reagan was a massive failure as a president. And Barack Obama is regularly assailed by those who would scrape dogshit off Reagan's bootheels with their front teeth, so in love are they with the false memories they have of his abysmal presidency.

(This is by no means the only indicator that right-wingers are delusional; it is only the most glaring.)

Think about that when you hear conservatives crying about Obama's deficit spending, the highest we've seen since Ronald Reagan, unless you count the fiscal nightmares endured under George W. Bush (they don't). When Clintonian job creation becomes the norm, well before Obama's third year in office, you can forget it all over again.

That seems to be the way we roll.

pH 11.o7.o9