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www.NationalView.org's Note From a Madman
July 3, 2008
Another Black Friday
(One Day Early)
I dread looking forward to Friday afternoons nowadays. Friday afternoons, in the
era (or is that error?) of the Bush administration - a.k.a. The Administration
of Diminished Responsibility - has been hard on any and all of us since the news
began turning bad. And, let's face it, the news has been bad for quite some time
now, no matter how they spin it.
As each new Friday approaches, I sit and wait. I wait for the upcoming bad news
which the Bushies put out each and every Friday, and that bad news has never
been as bad as it's been since the beginning of 2008, with the exception of
Tuesday, September 11, 2001, of course.
Yes, under the Bush administration, each and every Friday is a brand new Black
Friday.
But this week something different happened. Friday came a day early. Today,
Thursday - yes, THURSDAY - July 3, 2008, the news came out of the Department of
Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics that another month has ended with a net loss
of US jobs. At the end of June, employers reported that an additional 62,000
jobs have been lost to our economy. At the rate we're losing them, and while
under this current administration, they don't look as if they're coming back.
Black Thursday, if you will, came about because our government will be closed
tomorrow. After all, us regular middle-class folk - some of us who are working
two and three jobs apiece - can't expect our federal government to report bad
news on Independence Day, July 4th, even if it is a Friday.
Can we?
And certainly we can't expect President Bush or any of his band of NeoCons to
work on our nation's birthday.
Why, that would be downright unpatriotic. wouldn't it?
For six straight months our economy has been bleeding whatever jobs have been
left over from the outsource bloodletting described by Bush's economic advisors
as "a good thing". For six straight months, as our population grew and more
workers attempted to join the once mighty US workforce, we have let their jobs
slip away.
No additional tax breaks for millionaires will bring back these jobs. No more
wars for oil and or profit will create the "jobs of the future". Solutions
cannot be found by this administration because it has no desire to find them.
This White house is not only compassion-less, but passion-less in any and all
efforts relating to making the lives of the 200-250 million or so of us
considered to be in the middle class. Make no mistake about it - when our
economy tanks, it comes up to us to make up the difference.
And we always do.
In actuality, all of the economic news is very bad. Even BLS.gov's US Import
Price Index - a unit of measure which shows increases in the goods which
originated in other countries which we buy here - has skyrocketed by a whopping
2.3 percent. To put that in perspective, imagine purchasing a made-in-China fall
jacket that cost you $100 today. Now imagine that you wanted to purchase that
same coat a year from now for a friend. Adding the 2.3 percent monthly increase
to the import price of the jacket over a twelve month period would increase the
price of the gift to $137.31!
You would have to be a very good friend.
Numbers which in another time might look good, stand out in a very bad way from
the BLS.gov report. To begin with, the Civilian Labor Force shrunk by some
144,000 workers. In good times that might mean that these people no longer need
to work. Today it simply means that their circumstances are left for hopeless by
the President Bush. Similarly, an additional 365,000 people joined the "Not in
Labor Force" statistic. Does that mean that these people no longer want to work?
Not in these times it doesn't. 365,000 people would mean 1,000 people a day for
a year lost their jobs - but this number is in just one month! In the month of
June, 12,167 people each and every day lost their job or no longer are looking
for work.
Maybe driving from minimum-wage job interview to minimum-wage job interview
without any hopes of obtaining work cost them too much in gas money.
The number of employed shrunk by nearly three times the number of jobs lost.
155,000 people who were listed as "employed" in May, 2008 are no longer working
while the ranks of the unemployed was stretched by more than ten percent (from
8.487 million Americans to 8.499 million Americans).
Somehow, even in spite of all the proof of his failed policies, President Bush
and his would-be successor John McCain-McBush think that the only way to cure
the economic ills of our nation is to provide more stimulus to their "base of
haves and have mores". The idea is that the more money the ultra-rich are
awarded, the more they'll spend on us peons.
Call it the Neo-Trickle-Down theory of screwing the middle class.
That stuff trickling down smells kind of funny, doesn't it?
Here's how the White House web site's economic page began (talk about spin!):
"Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released new jobs figures for June.
Non-Farm payroll employment decreased by 62,000 jobs in June and the
unemployment rate remained unchanged at 5.5 percent, in line with expectations.
Although these numbers are disappointing, the unemployment rate remains below
the averages for the past three decades. Despite slow growth, the economy
continues to demonstrate resilience."
-Whitehouse.gov
Their theory? It's always darkest before the dawn.
I wonder how dark it will finally get before there is a spec of light?
-Noah Greenberg
Beating Up Madman
Victoria Brownworth notes," I admire Madman for taking a page from the GOP and
just utterly ignoring the disastrous series of giant moves to the right--far
right--that Obama has taken in the past two weeks. Not a mention or a murmur.
Almost as if you are saying, let's ignore it and it will go away. Alas, between
the FISA cave, the back peddling on the war and bringing the troops home, the
approval of the BAD decisions of the supreme court and the disapproval of the
one GOOD decision they made (not expanding the death penalty), the pledge to
out-Bush Bush on "faith=based" crapola, the assaults on Gen, Wesley Clark,
Hillary Clinton's top strategist and MoveOn and his promise to keep Secretary of
Defense Robert Gates in place, it's hard to imagine how we keep pretending it's
not happening.
Some of us said all along that Obama was Republican-lite, based on his previous
voting record and flip-flopping on key issues like the Patriot Act.
McCain will continue to be McCain and Bush and Cheney will continue to be Bush
and Cheney. But if Mr." I'm a new kind of politician "Obama continues--daily--to
move to the far right, shouldn't we say something about it? You know, just to
look like we aren't just like the GOP with our collective heads buried firmly in
the sand?
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-Noah Greenberg