Romney outsourced US Olympic uniforms to Burmese dictatorship in 2002

Nice.  There was a controversy last week when it was discovered that the US Olympic Team had its uniforms made in China. Oddly, Mitt Romney refused to pile on. Now we know why. From HuffPo:

Torchbearers, too, were shocked to see the “Made in Burma (Myanmar)” label on their tracksuits. "When I looked at the label for the uniform, I went nuts,” said 2002 torchbearer Susan Bonfield in an interview with the Guardian. “When you are sending work representing the U.S. to a military dictatorship, I have an issue with that."

More than 10,000 runners wore the uniforms, which are pictured on the Daily Kos, while carrying the Olympic torch to the Winter Games.

Perhaps most embarrassing, after receiving emailed protests from more than 1,000 activists, the media relations department at the Salt Lake Organizing Committee confused Burma and Myanmar as two separate countries.

"The torch relay clothes were NOT made in Burma. They were manufactured in Myanmar," the organizing committee responded. "In fact they were made in the exact same factory that produces clothes for GAP, North Face and other major clothing labels."

Read the rest of this post...

GOP already fundraising off of Holder-Issa showdown

Note the big red "donate" button.  Yes, the GOP is very concerned about this issue... and its potential for raising money for the election.  If they were only as concerned about jobs and the money far too many Americans still aren't seeing in their paychecks.

PS Why are Republicans always so ginned up about firing people?

Read the rest of this post...

Using Romney math, Obama added 3.7m jobs to economy during his term

The Washington Post's Greg Sargent explains how Mitt Romney is again lying, this time about President Obama's record on jobs' growth. Here Greg quotes the NYT:

Mr. Romney frequently says that Mr. Obama has presided over an economy that has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs. In a recent news release, the Republican campaign said, “Under President Obama, the nation has lost 552,000 jobs.”

But that statistic includes Mr. Obama’s first year in office, and especially the months of February, March and April, when monthly job losses from the economic collapse were at 700,000 or higher.

Just ignoring February of 2009, before any of Mr. Obama’s policies — including the economic stimulus — had been put into place, would wipe away all 552,000 lost jobs, giving the president a record of creating 172,000 jobs.

If Mr. Romney’s team were to ignore Mr. Obama’s first year in office — as Mr. Gillespie suggested should be done for Mr. Romney’s first year as governor — then the president would have added about 3.7 million jobs to the economy.

Of course, Mr. Romney’s campaign is unlikely to change its rhetoric or strategy. His bid for the White House depends on the idea that Mr. Obama has made the economy worse. Because the country has been adding jobs for nearly two years, Mr. Romney’s argument depends on the steep job losses in Mr. Obama’s first year in office.

So basically Mitt Romney is trying to blame President Obama for the jobs lost by George Bush. Read the rest of this post...

AP is rooting for the Republicans again

This is pretty bad. From Media Matters:

The Associated Press published an article implying that Democrats are not focused on jobs and the economy, and are instead pandering to women by pushing a measure to protect women from workplace discrimination. In contrast, AP reported that the Republican agenda focuses on job creation.

The article, written by Laurie Kellman, reported on Senate Republicans' efforts to successfully block a law that would have required equal pay for women. The piece included a passage that strongly suggests that Democrats are not focused on jobs, while portraying concerns over fair pay to be hollow:

The vote was the latest effort by Democrats to protect their lead among critical women voters this presidential and congressional election year. Republicans are focusing on the No. 1 concern for all voters: jobs and the economy.

In suggesting that Democrats are not focused on jobs and the economy, AP ignores President Obama's repeated calls for Congress to pass a jobs bill. Friday, when the Labor Department reported that jobs growth slowed during May, the president again called on Congress to "get to work" and pass a jobs bill that economists say could create 2 million jobs.

So, Democrats are focusing on a bill dealing with women's jobs, but that's not "jobs" to the AP. The Republicans, who have pretty much been trying to force the country back into a Depression from the first day of Obama's term, are the only party "really" focusing on jobs and the economy.

I guess in fairness to AP they the Republicans are focusing on jobs and the economy... in order to destroy them in time for the election. Read the rest of this post...

AP: Romney still fibbing about the "cost" of federal regulations

Romney is counting on American voters to be too uneducated, or lazy, to know that he's lying. And judging by recent history - Americans' "opposition" to health care reform, but support for most of its provisions, comes to mind - Romney's is a winning strategy.

AP:

Romney's vow to repeal "job-killing regulations" that are costing the economy billions of dollars may not be as easy as he makes it sound. He and many fellow Republicans complain that government regulations are a leading drag on jobs, but Labor Department data show that few companies where large layoffs occur say government regulation was the reason.

There's little evidence that the regulatory burden is any worse now than in the past or that it is costing significant numbers of jobs. Most economists believe there is a simpler explanation: Companies aren't hiring because there isn't enough consumer demand. Economists believe high levels of economic uncertainty are a leading complication for business, arising more from struggles over taxes and spending in Washington than from regulations.

Read the rest of this post...

RNC attacks Obama on jobs... from an overseas call center in the Philippines

From the AFLCIO:

The Republican National Committee (RNC) used a call center based in the Philippines to hold a media conference attacking President Obama's economic record, the Chicago Sun-Times reported today.The RNC didn't help its image by pointing out that the call was run by Verizon.

CWA Chief of Staff Ron Collins, who began his career in a Maryland-based Verizon call center, summed up RNC's move this way:

It’s hard to imagine anything more hypocritical than the RNC making calls about U.S. unemployment from a Verizon foreign call center.

Oh, I'm confident they'll eventually manage something even more hypocritical. Like defending the Bush record on jobs.  He'd be the guy who got us into this economic disaster in the first place. Read the rest of this post...

UE fell last month to 8.1 percent, but still not good numbers

As always, the jobs numbers are confusing - seemingly getting better, but not "better" enough, thus the tepid reviews of what looks like 'good' news. CNBC:

April's job report lived up to muted expectations, with the economy creating a meager 115,000 jobs during the month as the unemployment rate fell to 8.1 percent.

Job creation in the private sector was slightly better at 130,000, but overall the report painted a picture of a jobs market that had gotten a boost from unseasonably warm winter weather but now has cooled....

Though the headline number indicated job creation, the total employment level for the month actually fell 169,000. The disparity likely emanates from a drop in the labor force participation rate — or the level of Americans actively looking for jobs or otherwise employed — from 63.8 percent to 63.6 percent, its lowest level since December 1981.

Read the rest of this post...

Romney's slogan isn't working

As you might have heard, Romney's latest campaign slogan is 'Obama isn't working'. This appears to be both a reference to the famous 'Labour isn't Working' slogan created by the brothers Saatchi for the 1979 Conservative campaign in the UK, and a none-too-subtle dog whistle to remind voters of a common racist stereotype (i.e., the black man doesn't work).

The Saatchi slogan was also a double entendre. It pointed to the fact that UK unemployment had reached over a million under Labour, and the country had been crippled by strikes for months, the so-called 'winter of discontent'. It was a powerful slogan because it reminded voters of the two facts that were central to the Tory campaign.

While the Romney campaign is also attempting a double entendre, neither meaning is likely to resonate outside the Conservative base. Most voters remember that the recession started under the Bush administration (that didn't stop Romney from trying to blame President Obama for a factor that was closed under Bush). Claiming that Obama has not done enough to clean up the mess made by the last Republican President does not have quite the same punch as pointing to the collapse of British manufacturing under Labour.

There is also the fact that voters don't (at least not yet) seem to think Romney has any better economic expertise than Obama. A recent MSNBC poll found that there was essentially no difference between voters assessment of Romney and Obama on the economy. The Romney slogan might even backfire if people consider the Thatcher government as precedent: 18 months after the 1979 election, UK unemployment hit three million as the country's manufacturing base was destroyed and Britain became a net importer of manufactured goods for the first time since the industrial revolution.

The dog whistle aspect of the slogan might also backfire. Does it really make sense for a man who left business in 1999 and hasn't had a real job since 2007, because he's so rich he doesn't need to work, to accuse the President of being lazy? Read the rest of this post...

Obama JOBS Act (now signed) appears "specifically written to encourage fraud in stock markets"

Matt Taibbi totally fails to put too fine a point on it. Read:

Boy, do I feel like an idiot. I've been out there on radio and TV in the last few months saying that I thought there was a chance Barack Obama was listening to the popular anger against Wall Street that drove the Occupy movement, that decisions like putting a for-real law enforcement guy like New York AG Eric Schneiderman in charge of a mortgage fraud task force meant he was at least willing to pay lip service to public outrage against the banks.

Then the JOBS Act happened.

The "Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act" (in addition to being a viciously stupid and dishonest law, the Act has an annoying, redundant title) will very nearly legalize fraud in the stock market.

Actually, that's not putting things in strong enough language. In fact, one could say this law is not just a sweeping piece of deregulation that will have an increase in securities fraud as an accidental, ancillary consequence. No, this law actually appears to have been specifically written to encourage fraud in the stock markets.

As Taibbi notes, the law:

■ Exempts start-ups from "independent accounting requirements for up to five years after they first begin selling shares"

(Pause; reread; consider, that's five years without independent accounting for start-ups; now go on.)

■ Reverses rules that "prevent bank analysts from talking up a stock just to win business"

■ Will let start-up executives give "pre-prospectus" presentations — yep, you read that right — for which "they will not be held liable for misrepresentations"

And contains other atrocities. Please, do read. Then weep. Then tell your children never to give good money to the stock market.

Why is this happening? you ask. Guess:



And in case you don't recognize yourself, sir, this is addressed to you, our Signer-in-Chief. I don't see Boehner's hand around that pen.

Side note — Voice-in-the-wilderness here, but what fool disabled embedding for all YouTube versions of the original Liza Minelli–Joel Grey performance? That film was made in 1972; what are you protecting? (Just thought I'd ask.)

GP

To follow on Twitter or to send links, click here: @Gaius_Publius
  Read the rest of this post...

Krugman: "We're already in a new great depression"

Via Digby, we find this, from The Professor's latest trip to Euro econ meetings. These are his reflections.



Who knows? He could be wrong.

Update: Keep in mind, World War II was a lot of things. Among them, it was the mother of all government-spending stimulus programs. The Keynesisans were right.

GP Read the rest of this post...

The human cost of your iPad and iPhone: child labor and poisoning the environment

We covered Apple earlier, but there's a lot more to the story than just loss of U.S. jobs.

Props to the New York Times for making the "human cost" point a feature story, and making it so well. Given the Tabloid Saint status of Steve Jobs these days (Tabloid Saint: He of whom no ill can be publicly spoken), this is quite a brave act.

But yes, children, there's a human cost to your iPad, your iPhone, your iLife. And it's not a small one.

The article's overview (my emphasis):

In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. ... However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.

More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning [pdf].

“If Apple was warned, and didn’t act, that’s reprehensible,” said Nicholas Ashford, a former chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a group that advises the United States Labor Department.

The whole article is eye-opening and painful.

But maybe not eye-opening at all. Let's look at just two pieces of it:

Piece 1 — I highlighted a short list of sins in the paragraphs above. Stand till you can't walk. Under-age workers. Ordered to use poisons as cleaning agents. There are other kinds of abuse, but just take those.

What does this add to? Pre-union conditions in U.S. manufacturing plants — 12-hour days, child labor. Standing on assembly lines until you couldn't stand; peeing in a can because if you left the line you'd get fired. Unsafe machinery (think loss of hands and feet, arms and legs). Unsafe chemistry, including acids with toxic fumes.

Economic servitude created those conditions; and control of bought political actors (retainers) by giant economic predators (the Rockefellers and Pullmans of the world) perpetuated it.

Apple — that self-advertised faux-hip company with the secret control-freak center, just like its founder — is one of this-gen's major predators, eaters of men, heirs to the Carnegies and the Pullmans.

(Why do I keep mentioning Pullman? Read on. The Pullman Company, like Apple, is an actual demon, not just a tabloid one; and Eugene V. Debs, its victim, is a Labor Saint.)

That's what you do when you buy an iPad; you enable Apple in its two pronged assault. The right hand of Apple makes ads that make you look cool; the left hand of Apple lays waste to workers you'll never be allowed to see, kills in another country.

Not to put too fine a point on it (my favorite phrase these days) — Our hipster life is bought with Dickensian blood; loss of limbs; loss of life. Or, to paraphrase Mel Brooks, "It's good to be the middle-class in America" — at least for now. (Don't worry, you who love justice; our day is coming, I fear.)

Piece 2 — You thought that last part was bad? How's this — Didn't you always know this? As I said, maybe not eye-opening at all.

Maybe it's time for us, we as a nation, to unite behind Labor, to Occupy the Truth and act differently. Not just economically; but politically.

And isn't it time for Labor to actually pick a side, instead of just pretending to? There may not be a ton of time left to decide.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Krugman: What's being cut is heavily focused on investment; that's an "utter disaster"

The Professor does put too fine point on it. The austerity situation in this country is "an utter disaster."

In a recent post, Paul Krugman identifies what Republican-induced (and Obama-enabled) austerity is doing to the United States — we're slashing investment to pander to electoral freaks on the right (and the Billionaires who love them).

(Sorry, was that too direct? Sometimes I forget myself. By "electoral freaks" I naturally mean fine and worthy citizens of the opposite but reasonable persuasion; people who spend more time at the mall than the airport; people who rarely get porn-scanned. Them.)

Here's Krugman's way of putting it (my emphasis):

[W]e’re sacrificing the future as well as the present. Oh, and the cuts that aren’t falling on investment in physical capital are largely falling on human capital, that is, education.

It’s hard to overstate just how wrong all this is. We have a situation in which resources are sitting idle looking for uses — massive unemployment of workers, especially construction workers, capital so bereft of good investment opportunities that it’s available to the federal government at negative real interest rates. ... What an utter disaster.

"What an utter disaster" indeed.

Think back to all of last year, when Mr. Bipartisan threw rightwing-framing gold at the Republicans so they (and their racist base) would like him. Mr. Multi-dimensional Mindset. Mr. Chill, I Got This.

Mr. Reap What You Sow, say I.

Not in 2012, of course — he's a shoo-in for that one. No, the reapage will come later. Obama will spend the rest of his life repairing his legacy; which will only stand scrutiny inside the moat around the walls that surround the gated mansions he's due to be fêted in, while the wind howls outside everywhere else.

The man has ruined us (if The Professor is to be believed). We now have a vastly diminished national investment, and without investment, a vastly diminished future.

And yet it's still arguable that the next Republican president could be worse. After all, that one might try never to leave office. Then where would we be?

What a revolting development, the radicalized Riley might say. The radicalized Krugman agrees.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Apple has created up to 700,000 jobs ... in Asia

This is a two-fer; I'm going to link two opinion pieces to make one point.

First, Paul Krugman, in a recent column commenting on Mitch Daniels' assertion that American businessman Steve Jobs was a hero–job creator who should be emulated. He gets to the Apple point midway through (my emphasis):

[A]nyone who reads The New York Times knows that [Daniels'] assertion about job creation was completely false: Apple employs very few people in this country.

A big report in The Times last Sunday laid out the facts. Although Apple is now America’s biggest U.S. corporation as measured by market value, it employs only 43,000 people in the United States, a tenth as many as General Motors employed when it was the largest American firm.

Apple does, however, indirectly employ around 700,000 people in its various suppliers. Unfortunately, almost none of those people are in America.

Krugman points out that it's not just the low wages; it's also the local supply infrastructure. But even so, how did the whole of it, the factories and that lovely network of local parts suppliers, get there to begin with?

Answer — American industrial policy. Yes, we did it to ourselves. (By "we" I mean the do-ers, Our Betters; and by "ourselves" I mean the do-ees, you and me.)

American government always has an industrial policy. We've never been without one. And in the last 30 years, the right-wing Reagan government — and every U.S. government since — has grown campaign-contribution-fat by picking corporate winners and labor losers in the newspeakishly named "free market." The rest is just disinformation, something to keep you confused until they've robbed you totally blind.

Here's Robert Reich to make the connection:

Jobs Won't Come Back to America Until the Government Pushes Greedy Corporate Executives to Invest at Home

That's his headline, not to put too fine a point on it.

And here's a bit of the meat (my emphasis below).

... An Apple executive says “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.” He might have added “and showing a big enough profits to continually increase our share price.”

Most executives of American companies agree. If they can make it best and cheapest in China, or anywhere else, that’s where it will be made. Don’t blame them. ... What they want in America is lower corporate taxes, less regulation, and fewer unionized workers. But none of these will bring good jobs to America. These steps may lower the costs of production here, but global companies can always find even lower costs abroad. ...

But here’s the political problem. American firms have huge clout in Washington. They maintain legions of lobbyists and are pouring boatloads of money into political campaigns. After the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision, there’s no limit.

Who represents the American workforce? ... [C]orporate America isn’t their friend. Without bold government action on behalf of our workforce, good American jobs will continue to disappear.

The headline makes the point stronger than the piece itself, but still, the point is there.

Government always acts (or not-acts) in someone's behalf. It always picks winners and losers, in exactly the same way you do when you decide to see Chucky Does Paris rather than Midnight in Missoula — or even when you stay home instead with a big box of deep-fried Drummer Boy Wings and your tears. Someone walks away with your dollar, and the rest just walk. Same diff.

The real question is — What's American labor, chained as it is to the NeoLiberal-dominated Democratic party, going to do about it?

Not many choices, are there? I can think of just three — Leave the party. Kick those corporate-financed NeoLibs out of first position and take over. Whine.

If you don't pick (1) or (2), the third picks you (not to put too fine a point on it).

GP Read the rest of this post...

Krugman on jobs: We’re a decade away from full recovery

Despite understandable optimism regarding the latest jobs report, the Professor is not pleased.

Here's why (my emphasis):

First, note that there are still about 6 million fewer jobs than there were at the end of 2007 — and that we would normally have expected to have added around 5 million jobs over a four-year period. So we’re 11 million jobs down — and we need at least 100,000 jobs a month just to keep up with working-age population growth. Do the math, and you’ll see that it would take 9 or 10 years of growth at this rate to restore full employment.

Alternatively, note that during the Clinton years — all 8 of them — the economy added around 230,000 jobs a month [and] the unemployment rate fell about 3 1/2 percentage points — which is about what we’d need from here to get back to something that felt like full employment. ... [T]his suggests that we’re looking at something like a decade-long haul to have full recovery.

So yes, this is better news than we’ve been having. But it’s still vastly inadequate.

The "decade away" part isn't much in dispute by those who are truly looking, like our Professor. The real question is, Why aren't the political types looking with the same good eyes?

Of course, a cynical person might answer that:

     (1) The bipartisan elites (Our Betters) have decided that high unemployment is "the new normal".

     (2) Billionaire Beneficiaries of the modern tax code really are the true "job creators" and nothing should damage them:

[A] fair number of people who consider themselves centrist [say] that high-income individuals are “job creators” who must be cherished for the good they do.

     (3) It's too bad really, sad but necessary, that lowered expectations be therefore sold to the Rubes. (So look out Trust Fund.)

     (4) That's just the task at hand (and why they get the big bucks — from said Beneficiaries).

Might I be that cynical person? Not me; I'd never say such a thing.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Mitt Romney: Job Creator?

Job creation for Bain Capital and investors was pretty nice, but not so much for everyone else. Read the rest of this post...

Some other things Teddy Roosevelt said at Osawatomie

President Obama recently gave a speech at Osawatomie, Kansas. (Don't you just love these Midwestern Indian names? Michigan has a Genesee county; Kansas has a Wyandotte county; horrible Kathy Nicklaus lives in Waukesha. Great fun to say.)

Speaking at Osawatomie, Obama quoted Theodore Roosevelt:

“Our country,” [Roosevelt] said, “...means nothing unless it means the triumph of a real democracy ... of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.”

Sounds very progressive-sounding, doesn't it? (Yes, I meant that.) It also sounds pretty general, but that's Obama's style it seems; promise the general, deliver the second lieutenant.

Obama went to Osawatomie quoting Roosevelt because Roosevelt also spoke at Osawatomie, in 1910, and in my opinion gave a much better speech (PDF). I mean, how do you compete with this prose, taken just as prose:

There have been two great crises in our country's history: first, when it was formed, and then, again, when it was perpetuated; and, in the second of these great crises - in the time of stress and strain which culminated in the Civil War, on the outcome of which depended the justification of what had been done earlier, you men of the Grand Army, you men who fought through the Civil War, not only did you justify your generation, not only did you render life worth living for our generation, but you justified the wisdom of Washington and Washington's colleagues.

But to the point, Obama appears to have read only Roosevelt's intro, since he quotes just the second sentence. Here are some other things Teddy Roosevelt said at Osawatomie (h/t Kevin Murphy via email; all emphasis and reparagraphing mine):

■ The Constitution guarantees protections to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation.

The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man's making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being.

The creature of man's making shall be the servant and not the master. How do you not love that? (Given his immediate need, I'm not sure our Fierce Defender understands who is the master.)

More Roosevelt:

■ There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains.

Very modern, yet we're still waiting to implement this, after all these years. It's a straight line, isn't it — from corporate personhood under the 14th Amendment to "money equals speech" to Citizens United and endless cash endlessly buying elections.

Undoing corporate power is one of the tasks of this just-born century. A hundred years ago, Roosevelt considered it a task for the last one. We're late.

On punishment for corporate malfeasance:

■ I believe that the officers, and, especially, the directors, of corporations should be held personally responsible when any corporation breaks the law.

Incentives matter. Humans held responsible for human behavior when they cause deaths, or worse, kill to win. And I'm a great fan of the Corporate Death Penalty — when corps kill people, they should be killed, their charters revoked. Let the shareholders roll dice to see who gets the shoes.

On Wall Street investing vs gambling:

■ Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered - not gambling in stocks, but service rendered.

If Obama would say that with his deeds, I'll be a Fierce Defender myself.

And finally, Roosevelt making the "living wage" argument, which (once) was an actual core teaching of the Catholic Church:

■ No man can be a good citizen unless he has a wage more than sufficient to cover the bare cost of living, and hours of labor short enough so that after his day’s work is done he will have time and energy to bear his share in the management of the community.

Meanwhile, the history of the minimum wage, even under Democratic control of government, is shameful. In real terms, the U.S. minimum wage peaked in 1968.

I'll stop here, but feel free to read the rest of the speech. It's chock full, famous for a reason.

Does Obama's "I get it" speech stand up? I guess that depends on what he actually does, and not what he says.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Guess which presidents killed manufacturing jobs in the last 20 years? Their names are Bush

Newt Gingrich is off claiming, with an unflappable voice of authority, of course, that President Obama has killed manufacturing jobs for three years now. Except that, according to independent fact-checker Politifact, Newt would be wrong. Oh but it gets better. Which presidents have increased manufacturing jobs, and which have killed them, over the past 24 years? Take a look at the list from Politifact:

Barack Obama: Increase of 157,368 manufacturing jobs per year in office
George W. Bush: Decrease of 434,143 manufacturing jobs per year in office

Bill Clinton: Increase of 37,143 manufacturing jobs per year in office
George H.W. Bush: Decrease of 336,000 manufacturing jobs per year in office

Ronald Reagan: Increase of 1,429 manufacturing jobs per year in office
Jimmy Carter: Increase of 15,333 manufacturing jobs per year in office

Yes, since 1988, every time we've had a Republican in office we've lost manufacturing jobs, and every time we've had a Democrat we've gained them.  Heck, even Jimmy Carter beat Reagan and all the rest of the Republicans.  And Reagan was still far worse than any of the Democratic presidents.

This goes along nicely with a post I wrote back in July, in which I determined that 71% of the national debt occurred under GOP presidents, while 28% occurred under Democratic presidents (the data wasn't clear on who created the last 1%).

GOP Presidents      Dem Presidents
$9.5 trillion            $3.8 trillion

Total debt is $14.3 trillion.
$1 trillion of debt comes from before Reagan (NYT doesn't make clear who created that debt).
$13.3 trillion accumulated from Reagan to Obama.

71% of the $13.3 trillion was under GOP presidents.
28% of the $13.3 trillion was under Dem presidents.

(Source: NYT pieced together data from Treasury, OMB, Federal Reserve Bank of NY, and more)

PS And before anyone says "you have to look at who controlled Congress," I don't recall the Republicans worrying about that fact when they blamed Obama for the deficit and the national debt.

What's more, I also don't recall any Republican presidents vetoing the debt ceiling increase during their tenure. In fact, many of the biggest causes of the national debt were GOP presidential initiatives, such as:

* Reagan defense budgets and tax cuts
* George HW Bush gulf war
* George W Bush tax cuts, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So if we really want to talk the deficit and unemployment, and which party always seems to be around when things go south, look no further than the facts. Read the rest of this post...

The downside of cutting millionaires out of unemployment insurance

An interesting observation from HuffPost Hill:

The new payroll tax proposal from Senate Democrats would disqualify millionaires from unemployment insurance. Doing so would save money and might win Republican support, but it could also slowly erode the commonly-held notion that unemployment compensation is an insurance paid for with payroll premiums, like Social Security retirement benefits. Instead, people might start to consider it a welfare benefit, something for poor people, which would make the program more politically vulnerable. We didn't think of that. FDR did.

Read the rest of this post...

Are we all being too negative about the unemployment numbers?

Chris wrote earlier about the new unemployment numbers showing a drop in unemployment, but a lackluster rise in "jobs added" to the economy.  The disparity comes from, as I explained at the bottom of the post, the government using two different metrics for determining the unemployment rate and how many jobs were added or last in the previous months.  Thus, this time we got both good news and bad news about the same thing.

A reader, Dee, wrote, saying we're all being too negative. Read what she had to say. What do you think?

Once again some of our wonderful friends in the media are trying to have their cake and eat it too. Unemployment in November dropped from 9% to 8.6% and somehow that has been turned into bad news. So it seems that when the unemployment number goes up because more people enter the workforce...that's bad for Obama; but when the unemployment number goes down because more people leave the workforce...that's also bad for Obama. As usual, President Obama can't win for losing!

NEWSFLASH: You can't have it both ways so which is it???

It seems that no matter what happens, the media always seems to find a way to tell us that contrary to popular belief, ANY news is bad news. Some immediately climbed onto the "people dropped out of the workforce" train without even a mention that some of those people actually retired or were given early retirement packages. Also, there was very little mention that the unemployment numbers from September and October were adjusted to better than expected.

FYI...we're not dumb. We know that a little good news for one month is not going to solve everything that's wrong with our country, but dang--can we at least HAVE a little good news for one month instead of you always trying to find the 'rain' in the rainbow!

Is it any wonder why the majority of Americans feel things aren't getting any better? Because even when it looks like we may be climbing out of the massive hole we're in--even just a little bit, we can always count on our wonderful media friends to find a way to knock us right back down in it!

FYI...smile, sometimes good news may actually be good news!

Read the rest of this post...

Republicans sign on to payroll tax cut extension, or so it seems

Let's wait and see what their proposal is for funding the extension, then we'll talk about how they've seen the light.  I will say that this is one more sign of the GOP starting to get worried about next year's election, and their sinking image in the polls. Read the rest of this post...