With a new year, a foiled terrorist plot, and a devastating earthquake, our slowly perishing economic viability has migrated from the headlines as of late. It’s almost as if we’ve already relegated the issue to the old folks’ home. Nevertheless, the propaganda peddlers and professional news-readers will undoubtedly continue to talk about economic “recovery,” pleading with your brain to make the case for optimism. I would tell you it’s going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better, but I’m not so sure about the latter part of that statement.
Let’s start with unemployment, which has been perhaps the most objectively identifiable failure of Barack Obama and his crack team of economic saviors. Unemployment ended up at over 10%, well over the peak of joblessness we were supposed to see without Obama and Wall Street’s stimulus plan. With the wonderful stimulus, unemployment is rampant, with minorities hit the hardest (with whom you’ll remember Obama did well at the polls). The only minorities who used to be the majority, and by that I mean Native Americans, are perhaps on the bottom rung – on many Indian reservations, unemployment is over 80%, wages are in the toilet with life expectancies to match. When will the job situation turn the corner? It sure didn’t show any signs of doing so last month, which was the worst month for American unemployment since the start of the current recession.
Even Wal-Mart is closing stores. If that doesn’t tell you something about the climate for retail, I don’t know what else to tell you. Wal-Mart announced this week it will shut down 10 ‘in-the-red’ Sam’s Club stores and cut 1,500 jobs as a cost-cutting measure. Meanwhile, those that do have jobs are working longer hours and making less money. Pay for production and non-supervisory work (some 80% of the private sector workforce) is 9% lower than it was in 1973.
Americans are going broke. 1.41 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009 – a 32 percent increase from 2008. Defaults and repossessions have been running at over 300,000 per month since February of 2009. Over a million American families were removed from their homes in the fourth quarter. These grim statistics are a dime a dozen, and pretty soon they’ll be twelve for a nickel.
WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve generated record profits last year, reflecting money made off its extraordinary efforts to rescue the country from the worst economic and financial crisis since the 1930s. The central bank announced Tuesday it logged a record windfall of $52.1 billion. Of that total, a record $46.1 billion gets turned over to the Treasury Department.
The private central bank? You don’t say! Who else?
JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) on Friday announced a record $9.3 billion payday for its investment-banking employees, setting the stage for competitors like Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) to also make eye-popping payouts.
Yes, it’s a good time to be a banker, as it has become more than crystal clear: Wall Street has killed Main Street.
The White House has even abandoned the patently dishonest “jobs created or saved” mantra, in favor of the better-sounding “we spent a lot of money, isn’t that worth something?” At the start of 2010, they still have the stones to claim that things would be much worse than if the government (by way of theft) had done nothing. So tell me, are you grateful for your government right now?
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