October slows slight job improvement

Slows?

The legacy of our consumption-based economy seems to be eating us up at the moment. Oh what a vicious economic cycle we're in right now!

I'm not necessarily looking to President Obama's Treasury Secretary for answers now that our financial sector has made huge profits, paid out huge bonuses to the very ones who have been eating us alive with their made up money tactics over these past two decades and now is lobbying to stay the same - all on the backs of the US Taxpayer!

People are hurting, and if the Obama administration doesn't take more bold steps to clean up the turdy money-changers on Wall Street, the hurt will last far too long! -Kevo

I have a nephew with two college degrees who can't find work. I know another young airline pilot who is underemployed. It seems senior captains are flying co-pilot these days. Both young men are married with young children. Their wives are supporting their families. For young adult men prolonged unemployment is demoralizing. Children suffer. Marriages fail.

Well everything is OK because we have bailed out Goldman Sacks and the big Wall Street banks. I guess that the Wall Street banks are doing nothing with our money to help put people back to work is peachy keen as far as Congress is concerned. After all they all have jobs.

glad to hear that "the slash and burn" of people's lives is abating -- many gracious thanks to all those in washington who have worked night and day for the abatement -- oh, wait,

that's right, the "Market" is a god, like Moloch or Jehovah, and it comes around at eatin' time, and eats people, and the "leaders" just watch... or maybe "stimulate" the great god...

whatta country!

... the unemployment rate reached a 26-year high of 10.2 percent, up from 9.8 percent in September, the Department of Labor said Friday in its monthly economic appraisal.

And is expected to stay above 10 percent through 2010. Through the fucking midterms. But we don't need any more stimulus? More 11-dimensional chess?

This is a train wreck, folks. This is what BHO's nonsensical conceit of bipartisanship and obsession with changing the way things are done in Washington buys us.

Waterloo? Anzio? How about Little Bighorn?

I'm always sort of amazed when I see that the government has only been keeping track of these figures since 1994. Why not until then?

Echoing the comments above, I remain doubly suspicious/untrusting of Summers and others like him. After all, yesterday was the tenth anniversary of the Glass-Stegal repeal, which led us into this mess. See Digby for a quick read about it.

Summers was elbow-deep in the repeal of the law put in place to prevent exactly what has happened in the financial sector recently, and the fact that he is yet again in such a lofty position handling the levers of control is scary, and emblematic of problem as well.

Improvement? 300,000 jobs a month fewer than needed to keep up with population growth. That means things are getting worse slightly less quickly, but we're far from improvement. And even the business press should be able to see that.

So, is this the "transparency" that I've been waiting to see? Guess it's time I thought about a career "reinvention" back up plan. I hear nursing is still lucrative.

Before 1980s, the unemployment statistics included the underemployed. At some point during the Reagan administration the measure was redefined to exclude "underemployed", creating the need for a separate measure which wasn't tracked until the 1990's.

But I would guess that the exact definitions behind these measures has changed a number of times, so your mileage may vary... Same deal with the measures of inflation: the definitions of consumer and producer prices change continually.

Ditto what Kevo said.

And I think Wall Street, and along with it the broader economy, isn't so much in true recovery as in denial right now. Or perhaps metaphorically, Like a drug addict rescued from the come down by getting one last hit. The speed with which business as usual continues apace in the banking sector after this brush with catastrophe is shocking.

The root of the problems we face is systemic and decades deep. Probably the biggest "root" of the problem is that, as a nation, our ability to make products (i.e. manufacturing sector) is in continual decline. Globalization, out-sourcing, mergers with eventual downsizing, call it what you will, but the effect is to strip jobs that make "things" out of the American economy. What's left behind after you strip the middle class of this major source of jobs? Professional jobs, service jobs, and a consumer driven economy that survives only by racking up an average of 3/4 of a trillion dollars in trade debt annually. Further hobbling America's economy is the hundreds of billions of oil imports we consume each year.

When you see all that ostentatious display of wealth in places like Saudi Arabia or Dubai, where they have so much damn money they dream up ways of pissing it away like building "islands", it's little comfort here in America to know that,as the world's foremost consumer of their product, that's our wealth being flushed down the toilet. But I digress.

Until we renew our commitment to create "things" 'a la the 1950's, the middle class will continue to consume debt as a way of numbing its march into decline and the wealth gap,and along with it the power gap, will continue to widen in this country.

Saw an article in firedoglake where a stimulus program to put wind turbines in West Texas is planning on spending the vast majority of the money buying Chinese made turbines rather than US made ones. It's worth taking a look at.

http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/13441

Out of 2,330 jobs created, 2,000 of them are in China at the cost of $450 million stimulus funds to buy 240 turbines.

And is expected to stay above 10 percent through 2010. Through the fucking midterms. But we don't need any more stimulus?

Meanwhile, the only 25% of the $787 billion Porkulus bill has neen spent.

By election day 2010, only 60% will have been spent.

Almost $200 billion won't be expended until 2012...

Call it a "retarded"* stimulus.

*("developmentally disabled")