Here’s another graph showing the historical real unemployment rate (counting long-term discouraged workers).

http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2013/05/but-melvin-hes-so-historic-true.html

What seems to be going on with the up and down unemployment numbers is this: Employers simply run out of people they can lay off, and the weekly job layoff figures temporarily go down. But in an economy which is actually continuing to steadily decline, even the reduced number of employees proves to be too many, and there are more layoffs, and so the cycle continues.

Unfortunately, it’s not just O. A large and controlling faction of the Democrats supports the grand bargain. Reid, the Clintons, and even Pelosi all belong to the grand bargain faction. (Biden holds an ambiguous position–he is at least to some extent a supporter of retaining Social Security at its present levels and yet he is at the same time a loyal VP). A change in Democratic policies requires not only the weakening of Obama as president but a revolution (or rather counter-revolution) within the party so that its anti-DLC element, which dominated on domestic issues from the time of Franklin Roosevelt until around the mid-1970s, again assumes control. Of course much more than this is necessary to reform and revive American society, but this is a necessary first start.

The persistence of Obamamania is amazing, however. Today in the Illinois State Capitol I saw a demonstration in which Service Employees International Union (SEIU) home health care workers wore Obama teeshirts!

Absolutely. The whole purpose of the public option was to remove support for Medicare for All (a much better term than the horrible “single payer”). Instead of a debate between Medicare for All and private health insurance, the argument then shifted to the right into a contest between a public-private hybrid (the “public option”–also horribly titled) and continuation of the private insurance system with some tweaks designed to force more people into coverage whether they could afford it or not. Obviously, the game was rigged so that this last alternative would ultimately prevail.

There is also a second dimension to the extended debate that preceded the enactment of Obamacare. Health care coverage is a very important issue but the timing of this debate was all wrong. The overriding issue at the time was (and continues to be) the state of the economy. The Obamacare debate was, I believe, a deliberate distraction from economic issues and the urgent need to curb the almost unrestricted powers of the huge financial institutions.

All very slick eleven dimensional chess.

She is an absolute corporatist with a feminist veneer. Controlling, condescending, and humorless. I attended a campaign appearance once where the audience waited in pouring rain for her for over an hour. After she finally appeared under the cover of her rain shelter, she proceeded to make her speech to the TV cameras, without one word of thanks for the crowd who had waited for her.

Also, like Obama, she is an advocate for the military/security establishment, much more so than her husband. I really believe that Bill Clinton, who unlike his wife is a genuinely talented politician and has some populist instincts, would have been somewhat more liberal without her (though without her in-group networking and fundraising abilities, the upward trajectory of his career probably would have stopped at governor of Arkansas or U.S. Senator).

It is a mistake to think of the Republicans and Democrats as two separate entities. They are two wings of a Uniparty, playing their respective loyal foot soldiers for suckers. If the Republicans were more moderate, the Democrats, to distinguish themselves, would have to move further to the left. Keeping the Republicans to the extreme right allows the Democrats to distinguish themselves merely by being somewhat less to the extreme right. This is exactly as the PTB wishes.