A couple of years ago, you might remember that McDonalds got a lot of publicity out of a one day hiring binge. I wrote about it here with a follow-up about the Washington Post noticing that it was a “McJobs” economic recovery a couple of weeks later. So here we are, two years later and where exactly are we?

At best, we are treading water. At best.

Today, NBC News‘ web site had this article titled ”In tough economy, fast food workers grow old” discussing the reality of older workers working in the fast food world. They had a companion article on fast food jobs as portrayed in the movies over the past couple of years (presumably in an attempt to off-set the negative implications of the original) but the stories in the first article should be heeded:

In many ways, she is a typical fast-food worker: She’s older than you’d expect, has more years of schooling and works in the industry not for entry-level experience, but to try to keep her head above the financial storm that threatens to swamp her.

Due to the lingering effects of the Great Recession, the Hollywood image of the care-free, freckle-faced, teenage hamburger flipper is no longer the norm. Only 16 percent of fast food industry jobs now go to teens, down from 25 percent a decade ago.

And many of the older workers are educated. More than 42 percent of restaurant and fast-food employees over the age of 25 have at least some college education, including 753,000 with a bachelor’s degree or higher, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Jobs: Recovery is at Hand!

Yes, fast food jobs are not just for teenagers anymore.

I’ve actually noticed a few articles these past few months discussing working poor, low wage jobs, and the on-going unemployment crisis. First up is this from the Washington Post in January on the growing ranks of working poor:

Nearly a third of the nation’s working families earn salaries so low that they struggle to pay for their necessities, according to a new report.

The ranks of the so-called working poor have grown even as the nation has created new jobs for 27 consecutive months and is showing other signs of shaking off the worst effects of the recession.

As I discussed a couple of years ago, minimum wage is not a salary where someone is going to get ahead.

At the end of March, NBC News had an article looking at the growing ranks of poor families in the suburbs:

The number of suburban residents living in poverty rose by nearly 64 percent between 2000 and 2011, to about 16.4 million people, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of 95 of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. That’s more than double the rate of growth for urban poverty in those areas.

At the end of this article, there were links to some further articles including, “‘By the grace of God’: How workers survive on $7.25 per hour” and “Media coverage of poverty: Why ‘so little’?” (coverage of a Dan Froomkin essay.)

On April 1 (and not an April Fools Day joke) CNN had an article on the lousy pay at the 10 most common jobs in the US:

Food prep workers are the third most-common job in the U.S., but have the lowest pay, at a mere $18,720 a year for 2012. Cashiers and waiters are also popular professions, but the average pay at these jobs tallies up to less than $21,000 annually. There are 4.3 million retail sales workers out there, making them the most common job, but the position pays only $25,310 for the year.

As a companion to the incredibly shrinking pay checks and the increase in the working poor, there are also the stresses put on workers by the jobs. First up here is this article from NBC News in early January, “Temp employees more likely to succumb to workplace hazards: Read the rest of this entry →

Photo: Doug Geisler / Flickr

The ADP Report on private sector jobs came out today and showed an increase of 158K jobs. David Dayen at the FDL News Desk discusses this report and the Bureau of Labor Statistics report that will be issued tomorrow morning (Friday, November 2):

Plug this all in and what have you got? The consensus forecast calls for an increase in 125,000 jobs. That would be an increase from last month’s increase of 114,000, but below the increases in July and August (August and September will get revised in the report). This generally matches what we’re seeing in the ancillary reports, and shouldn’t be a number that would arouse joy or sadness in either Presidential campaign. However, with the volatility of last month’s topline unemployment rate, derived from the household survey, I wouldn’t be surprised if you saw it increase from the current level of 7.8%.

Either way, it’s a preliminary report, and we probably shouldn’t put as much weight on it as we will, especially with the political implications headed into the election.

While the weekly report of initial unemployment claims was lower than expected (economists surprised!), even this moderately good news is not all that great.

The reality for many millions of us among the long term un and underemployed is the good jobs just are not there. At the end of August, Catherine Rampell of the NY Times had an article headlined “Majority of New Jobs Pay Low Wages, Study Finds.” As I noted in this post, it was very similar to an earlier post from April ’11 I had written that was based on a Washington Post article. Both the Times article and the Post article were based on reports from the National Employment Law Project.

Sunday in the NY Times, Steven Greenhouse had this article on how employers in retail and hospitality industries use (and abuse) part time workers:

But in two leading industries — retailing and hospitality — the number of part-timers who would prefer to work full-time has jumped to 3.1 million, or two-and-a-half times the 2006 level, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In retailing alone, nearly 30 percent of part-timers want full-time jobs, up from 10.6 percent in 2006. The agency found that in the retail and wholesale sector, which includes hundreds of thousands of small stores that rely heavily on full-time workers, about 3 in 10 employees work part-time….snip…

A 2011 survey of 436 employees at retailers in New York City, as diverse as luxury establishments on Fifth Avenue and dollar stores in the Bronx, found that half of the city’s retail workers were part-time and only one in 10 part-time workers had a set schedule week to week. One-fifth said they always or often had to be available for call-in shifts, according to the survey, which was overseen by researchers at City University of New York.

…snip…

Mr. Flickinger, the retail consultant, said companies benefited from using many part-timers. “It’s almost like sharecropping — if you have a lot of farmers with small plots of land, they work very hard to produce in that limited amount of land,” he said. “Many part-time workers feel a real competition to work hard during their limited hours because they want to impress managers to give them more hours.”

What? Could someone have actually spoken a truth here? The modern day wage slave, complete with sharecropping as the ideal.

While CNN has an article this morning attempting to paint the rosy glasses scenario on how the jobs are not all part time minimum wage, even they have to acknowledge the reality of the lower wage since 24% of the “new” jobs are in hospitality and retail:

Read the rest of this entry →

So I was doing my standard web surfing this AM after I had checked the (non-existent) jobs listings when I saw this from Bloomberg with the title, “Half of Wall Street Employees Expect Bigger Bonuses”:

Almost half of Wall Street employees expect their year-end bonuses to be higher this year than they were a year ago, according to an eFinancialCareers.com survey.

Of the 911 U.S. financial professionals who responded to the e-mailed survey, 48 percent anticipate a higher payout, up from 41 percent in a similar survey last year, the job-search website said today in a statement. Employees of hedge funds and other asset managers were more optimistic than those at banks and broker-dealers, according the statement. Of the respondents, 82 percent work for U.S.-based companies.

Well imagine my surprise this afternoon when I see this one from Bloomberg titled “Wall Street Bonus Pool Seen Shrinking for Second Straight Year”:

Wall Street’s cash bonus pool is likely to fall for a second straight year as the financial industry grapples with market turmoil, economic weakness and new rules, New York state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said.

Revenue and compensation trends have “edged downward” since February, when DiNapoli estimated that the 2011 pool for Wall Street declined by 13.5 percent to $19.7 billion, the comptroller said today in a report.

The New York Times presented it this way this afternoon:

It still pays to be on Wall Street.

Even as the financial industry in New York has slashed jobs by the thousands, the average worker who remains is collecting a near-record paycheck.

In a report released on Tuesday, the New York State Comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, said that the average pay package of securities industry employees grew slightly last year and was up 16.6 percent over the past two years, to $362,950. Wall Street’s total compensation rose 4 percent last year to more than $60 billion.

CNBC appears to be trying to split the differences with this report titled “Wall Street Expects Bigger Bonuses But May Not Get Them” as they report on the same survey that Bloomberg covered in the first link:

Revenue is down on Wall Street but expectations for bonuses are up — at least for some workers who have seen their pay shrink since the financial crisis explosion.

A survey from eFinancial Careers shows 48 percent of workers on the Street are looking for higher bonuses than 2011. Expectations are high even as investment banking revenue is down 11 percent for the same period last year while the securities industry overall saw revenue fall 7 percent in the first half.

At the same time, some of the larger firms have been doing better as the headwinds from the European debt crisis subside and hopes grow that the industry will close the year out strongly.

Meanwhile as Wall Street whines its way along, our (not-so-favorite) Masters of the Universe, Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon are once again daring to spout their nonsense. Jon Walker at FDL Action presents this:

What I find most ironic about these CEO deficit hawks complaining about the “uncertainty” that is hurting the economy is that they are the ones responsible for helping to create said uncertainty to begin with. The deficit obsession created the uncertainty about raising the debt ceiling. Similarly, they constantly pushed for a big deficit deal resulting in the creation of the sequesters, which are seen as a big source of the fiscal uncertainty at the moment. The main “uncertainty” about government policy right now is how the government will clean up the mess created by past efforts to force a deficit deal.

But hey, MotU never have to be accountable for destroying the economy. After all, they deserve those millions dollars of bonuses right? Destroying the global economy is hard ass work so they must be compensated for it.

Meanwhile, CNN actually touches base with the real world with this article on part time jobs being the new normal in employment. Notice how much attention is paid to the ravings of Blankfein and Dimon and the Wall St WATB versus the attention paid to the rest of us in the real world?

And because I can:
Happy Birthday John. RIP

Cross posted from Just A Small Town Country Boy by Richard Taylor

Every now and then, I seem to run across news articles and/or headlines that seem to be just a bit of an understatement even as they are quite factual. Usually it seems, we get things like this one from NBC News yesterday:

New jobless claims take surprise jump

New claims for unemployment benefits took an unexpected jump in the latest week, raising more concerns about the struggling job market and providing further incentive for the Federal Reserve to jump in and help the economy.

As I have written before, it surely does seem as if the economist are ALWAYS surprised. Which still makes me wonder how they manage to keep their jobs as in most career fields, if you are always surprised by what happens, pretty soon you’re looking for a new career.

A couple of days ago, I saw this piece from Alison Linn at the Today show with the headline:

Many in middle class say they are doing worse financially

The Great Recession and weak recovery have left slightly fewer Americans feeling like they are part of the middle class, and many who do still identify themselves as such say they are now worse off.

A new and comprehensive survey on how the middle class feels, released Wednesday by Pew Research Center, finds 42 percent of people who identify themselves as middle class say they are in worse shape financially than before the recession began. About 32 percent are in better shape, and the rest either don’t know or see no difference.

I am part of that 42% though in fact, I have been forced to accept that by income, I am no longer remotely close to “middle class.” I am poor.

NBC News had this piece last night that is very much a companion to the Linn piece:

Stronger economy delivers smaller paystubs for most of us
With recoveries like this one, who needs recessions?

The average household income has fallen steadily for nearly everyone since the start of the economic expansion in June 2009, with average income dropping 4.8 percent in the three years since the upturn began, according to a report released Thursday.

High unemployment, outsourcing of jobs and generally slow economic growth have restrained income for households during one of the weakest and most prolonged recoveries on record, according to the report from Sentier Research.

Last summer, I wrote this post about the interconnectedness of the global economy. Today, the NY Times has this article on how China is now having to deal with surplus inventory:

GUANGZHOU, China — After three decades of torrid growth, China is encountering an unfamiliar problem with its newly struggling economy: a huge buildup of unsold goods that is cluttering shop floors, clogging car dealerships and filling factory warehouses.

The glut of everything from steel and household appliances to cars and apartments is hampering China’s efforts to emerge from a sharp economic slowdown. It has also produced a series of price wars and has led manufacturers to redouble efforts to export what they cannot sell at home.

This actually does make me wonder how long this headline from CNN will be true:

Romney: ‘Big businesses are doing fine’

It is a global economy and eventually what happens to one piece of that global economy WILL trickle down to the rest of the globe. Meanwhile we get to see pics of Prince Harry acting like a single, 27 year-old man visiting Las Vegas.

And because I can:

Cross posted from Just A Small Town Country Boy by Richard Taylor

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This morning (Sunday, April 8) I was at the laundromat here in beautiful downtown Ruskin, FL and picked up a copy of the local, Tampa area Jobs Finder free newspaper. I’m sure most all of you have seen these free papers for your local area.

As I skimmed this paper, it reinforced for me that there is no economic recovery, at least not in this part of Florida. When I picked the paper up, I noticed it was awfully skinny so I counted pages. Eight whole pages. With large ads covering each page so I counted up all the ads. Thirty-nine ads for 8 pages. Then I looked even closer. Two ads were for the paper itself. Another two ads were for “start your own cleaning company” services. Then I counted nineteen ads for various types of training programs. Not for jobs. For for-profit training programs that might, maybe, if you can afford it and complete it, maybe get you a minimum wage job if you can survive to complete the six month to a year plus training program being offered.

No ads for local delivery drivers. No handyman type ads. No manual labor/construction service ads. No help wanted for local businesses and restaurants. No ads for jobs for any of the thousands of job types one usually sees in these types of free newspapers.

Now granted, this is obviously anecdotal but I would wager that in a lot of parts of the country, this is the current norm. It isn’t much better with the ads on Craigslist or Monster or other online job search services. One of the metrics I use to check for job market improvements is the number of job ads from body shop/consulting services/head hunter agencies versus the number of ads from employers directly. My WAG is that the former ads are running nearly 10 to 1 over the latter. Businesses that are hiring directly are still able to be extremely picky about who they interview and hire.

But I guess we are not to worry. Everything must be getting better since the Beltway Village Idiots Pundits and Politicians seem to be in full pearl clutching mode after DNC Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz went on CNN this morning and accused the Republicans of rooting for the economy to fail. Oh the horror of it all. Too bad that it seems to be beneficial to both parties to have the economy in doldrums. They all seem to forget that the 25M to 30M long term un and underemployed are each and every one, living, breathing, feeling human beings and not just statistics on the page full of numbers

And because I can:

Cross posted from Just A Small Town Country Boy by Richard Taylor

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So there I was, surfing around the intertoobz this morning when I came across this headline at CNN:

Stop vilifying venture capitalists

I have to admit, I was a bit taken aback at the headline as it surely did not reflect anything I had read.

In reading the piece, it starts off in a fairly standard fashion:

From 1984 to 1999, Mitt Romney was in charge at Bain Capital, an investment firm that sought out small and sometimes troubled companies that, with careful management and Bain-provided cash, offered the chance for big profits. Bain, like many venture capital firms, invested in startups with the hope that the profits they made on the successes would outweigh the losses they incurred on the failures.

Venture capital markets are simple things. Two groups of people who want to create new businesses come together. Venture capitalists have money but lack ideas. Entrepreneurs have ideas but lack money. When they get together, they trade and new businesses are born.

Then I realized that the author was not really saying much I could disagree with – other than his implication that Bain Co. was this benign entity only helping entrepreneurs to find the needed funding to bring their ideas to market as wiki defines it.

Today’s Boston Globe addresses this in this article.

Mitt Romney has long called himself a venture capitalist, experience he says helps him understand the economy better than other candidates for president. But he spent much more of his career in leveraged buyouts than in the investments in start-up companies known as venture capital.

Romney’s one true venture deal was Staples Inc., the office supply superstore, two years after he started Bain Capital. He wasn’t the first to discover Staples; another Boston venture firm introduced him to Staples founder Tom Stemberg. But Romney did lead the deal in 1986 in classic fashion – at first investing $650,000 in the start-up, then becoming its chief cheerleader and assisting with strategy to expand the seller of paperclips and pens.

…snip…

With leveraged buyouts, the investment firm purchases a mature company, partially with its money and with debt it transfers to the company. The new owners then usually streamline the business and seek to resell it.

For example, in the same year that Romney invested in Staples, he led the firm in its $200 million acquisition of Accuride, a wheel rim maker that was part of Firestone. Bain put down only $5 million and borrowed the rest, using junk bonds from Drexel Burnham Lambert. Eighteen months later, Bain resold the company and reaped $121 million in its first taste of the big time in the go-go 1980s.

Soon after, Romney steered Bain Capital more toward debt-driven buyouts. There was more money at stake and less risk for Bain than betting on untested technology.

My bold. And there you have it. While maybe starting life as a “venture capital” firm, Bain Co under Romney quickly turned to being Vulture Capitalists using the leveraged buyout.

At this point, I guess I should queue cue the chorus of voices shouting “FREE MARKET! FREE MARKET!”

Point of fact – there is no such thing. The LBO gets to use the debt interest to write down their taxes. By “streamlining” the business, the methods have often included cutting wages and benefits, selling off assets, and dumping pensions onto the taxpayers through the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp. Dean Baker explains it quite nicely here and here. From the first link:

If private equity firms were successful in making companies more efficient and lowering prices to consumers, then it could lead to more jobs in the economy, even if there were fewer workers directly employed in the firms under its control. (This does not really apply in the current economy, where inefficiency means more workers are employed. This is good in the context of a poorly managed macroeconomy with high unemployment.)

However private equity firms do not profit just by making firms more efficient. Private equity also profits by financial engineering. For example, it is standard practice for private equity firms to load their firms with debt. This means that interest payments, which are tax deductible, are substituted for dividend payments, which are not tax deductible.

Private equity companies also often force firms into bankruptcy to offload debt. This can often include pension obligations, which are then taken over by the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation. Insofar as private equity companies are drawing their profit from this sort of financial engineering, it is not providing a benefit to the economy. In fact, it is a direct drain on the productive economy.

So much for the nonexistent “free market.” If a firm has to offload their debts and pensions on the taxpayers, there ain’t a diddly damn thing free about it.

While I am still trying to figure out how it is possible for the LBO group to incur debt for an entity that they are acquiring (don’t you have to actually own something before you can mortgage it?), I’ll close this little rant with this article from today’s Cincinnati Enquirer headlined “Tax breaks for jobs: Half fall short.” A story for another day.

And because I can:

Cross posted from Just A Small Town Country Boy by Richard Taylor

"Perishable!" by Young Master Sunshine on flickr

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You might have seen some headlines from yesterday on the weekly report of Initial Unemployment claims about those claims “falling sharply” (Reuters headline phrase):

Applications for unemployment benefits fell by 37,000 to a seasonally adjusted 391,000 in the week ending September 24 from an upwardly revised 428,000 the prior week, the Labor Department said on Thursday. 

My first prediction today is that the 391K figure first announced will be revised upwards when next week’s report comes out. My second prediction is whatever good news that can be wrung from this report will have a limited overall effect.

CNN’s report was a bit more circumspect with this:

The recent drop to 391,000 maked the lowest level since the week of April 2, when 385,000 new claims came in. 

Still, economists cautioned against getting too excited about the better number. It’s just one week of data, and according to a government spokesman, seasonal adjustments could have impacted the calculation.

…snip… Read the rest of this entry →

Sign reads: "War On Greed - starring Henry Kravis and his homes" Photo: Brave New Films, on flickr

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If you read me often enough, you have probably noticed that I tend to check various news and opinion sites throughout the TradMed each morning, after I’ve spent a few minutes reviewing emails and jobs sites. Most of the time, I just shake my head at the various levels of stupidity I find, not being able to quite give it the full YOU HAVE GOT TO BE F*CKING KIDDING ME! treatment so richly deserved. Then there are days like today where teh stoopid is so truly dumbfounding.

Today, we have Henry Kravis, co-founder of private equity firm KKR, sending up a fine whine to Bloomberg on how tighter credit rules are forcing the private equity firms to kick in more of their own money and making buy-outs more expensive. Sayeth Mr Kravis:

“As the debt markets tighten and the cost of capital goes up, something has got to give,” Kravis said yesterday at the Bloomberg Dealmakers Summit in New York. “You just have to pay more.” 

Kravis, 67, said the cost of capital for a leveraged buyout has risen more than 2 percentage points since the firm agreed to buy Pfizer Inc.’s Capsugel unit in April, forcing buyers to put up more cash for deals and borrow less. Uncertainty in the equity markets also is making it more difficult to reap profits through initial public offerings or sales of companies owned by private-equity funds, he said.

…snip… Read the rest of this entry →

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On Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, I was living in Springfield, IL. I had been laid off from my previous employer back at the end of July so my usual routine was to get up, make the coffee, check my email and the various job hunting sites for anything within my skills and career field to apply to, then surf the news sites. That routine stayed pretty much the same, even the week before when I had visited my best friend in Jacksonville, FL for a week, having returned to Springfield on Saturday, September 8.

It was a sunny morning and my then feline companion had joined me at the computer when I saw the first news article about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. My first thought was something small like a single engine Cessna or something. Then I saw the reports of a second plane having hit the World Trade Center and knew my first thoughts had been so very wrong.

When I saw the news of the second plane, I turned on the TV and checked CNN. I think I hit there just as the South Tower was collapsing because all I really remember from that point was the confusion. I spent the rest of the morning in front of the TV, watching, just as millions of others around the country. I was sitting there feeling impotent and wanting to do something so contacted the local Red Cross. I wound up going in to their offices and giving blood. Along with a couple of hundred other folks in the Springfield area (my guess is that most blood banks across the country hit their capacity for at least a few weeks after 9/11).

I had spent most of the previous year (2000) officially living in Manchester, CT but commuting into Manhattan on Mondays and home to Manchester on Fridays via Amtrak and living during the week in a furnished studio in Battery Park City. Most mornings, I would walk up South End Ave to the World Financial Center where I would duck into the lobby, up to the walkway over West St and down to Liberty St. The first few months, I had been working down on John St near the South Street Seaport. I would head on up Liberty Street, past the Deutsche Bank Building, crossing over Broadway and down through the financial district. Occasionally, I would go to the local offices of my then employer on Wall St, so would head down past the Stock Exchange (and The Bull) but nothing at that end of Manhattan was much more than a ten to fifteen minute walk. After a few months, I was going over to offices on 16th St, near Union Square, so I would catch the N or R lines of the subway in the basement of the South Tower.

Now, as the name of my blog says, I’m a small town country boy and was not all that happy spending that year in Manhattan. The people I worked with were wonderful, friendly, hard-working people but there was just too much concrete for me, so when the opportunity opened up for Springfield, I transferred there. In a case of “be careful of what you ask for as you might get it,” I’m fairly certain I would not have been laid off if I had stayed with the projects in Manhattan. Yet there I was in the middle of the country, watching my “old neighborhood” on TV.

I know there were people I saw most every day who were injured or killed on September 11, 2001. There was a New York Fire Department Engine and ladder company on Liberty St, across from the South Tower and the Deutsche Bank Building. I’ve never been able to find out what happened to those first responders but I’m sure they were involved in the rescues. Most of the mornings when I was going to Union Square, I was in the offices by 7AM but occasionally, I would have to go to meetings over in Brooklyn and would be back on the subway, connecting to the A line under the towers so that I could get to a 9AM meeting on time. If the attack had come one year earlier, I would have been in the middle of it.

I don’t recall who sent me this picture (warning, it may load very slowly) but the little triangle on the left hand side of the picture sits on top of the building I lived in so you can see the scale of things. It was taken a couple of weeks after the attack.

The other thing that has stood out in my mind since September 11, 2001, besides wondering about the folks I passed each day going to and from work, was seeing the affects of media consolidation. Like many people, my attention span is not always able to stay with one thing for all that long sometimes. I recall channel surfing that morning and afternoon. I think except for Turner Classic Movies and maybe the Weather Channel, most every other cable and broadcast network available was broadcasting their parent’s top news anchors. TNT and TBS were with CNN. ESPN, ESPN2, Disney Channel all had ABC News. CBS News was on MTV, VHI, BET and the other Viacom networks. Fox News was on FX, Fox Sports, National Geographic, and some others. NBC News was on USA, Bravo, MSNBC, CNBC, and others. I had sixty some channels available to me on the Springfield cable system yet there were only five news sources showing.

And because I can:

Cross posted from Just A Small Town Country Boy by Richard Taylor

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Well, here we go again. As usual, the past couple of weeks there have been a few articles on how the economy really isn’t THAT bad. In fact, that was a large part of the title of this article from McClatchy while USA Today offered up this from a Maria Bartiromo interview with the head of AIG, Robert Benosche (with a McCainesque “There’s a core of strength to the economy”). However once again, the reality on the ground rears up to refute the cheerleaders. Today’s (Thursday, August 18) Initial Unemployment Claims report for last week is out and the numbers are back over the dreaded 400k line once again (via Reuters):

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits increased 9,000 to a seasonally adjusted 408,000, the Labor Department said.

Economists polled by Reuters had forecast claims rising to 400,000. The prior week’s figure was revised up to 399,000 from the previously reported 395,000.

Given that the trend the last few weeks has been for an upwards revision of the previous week’s numbers, I am not at all surprised at the upward revision from 395K initially reported to the 399K (although since I did not write a post on last week’s report, I can’t claim to have officially predicted the revision.)

Last Thursday, CNN had this article showing the lost jobs holes each state has to crawl out of to regain their pre-recession jobs numbers, especially when the new job seekers and residents for each state are factored in. Meanwhile, we got to ‘enjoy’ President Obama’s photo op Midwest bus tour this week (not to be confused with Cincinnati’s own Midwestern Hayride). Even though the lack of jobs has been an economic crisis for months years now, the elected officials, when they see fit to do something seem most intent on doing the wrong things. Marcy Wheeler has taken a few whacks at the stupidity of “free trade,” deficit reduction clueslessness, and the White House propensity for rhetoric over accomplishment, but I have to chime in with a big WTF over this NY Times article from this past Sunday: Read the rest of this entry →