Meanwhile, back on Main Street, never in recent times has it been more clear that those at the top are doing abundantly well while the rest make do with the crumbs falling off the table. The Dow Jones has, at the time of writing, more than recovered to the level it reached when the Bush Great Recession broke out and almost collapsed the entire global economy. The perpetrators of the collapse are doing just fine, in no small part due to the bailout taken from the pockets of the working class through their taxes to cover the bad bets made by Wall Street gamblers. And the floating crap game is again underway, secure that the chief law enforcement officer of the US government is too much of a coward to do his job. And if one listens to "news" radio, speculator ads are again appearing, seeking to suck in the greedy to convert them to needy.
So instead of bread, Main Street gets circuses, the latest of which shouts to the rafters that new jobs are to be had. But looking through the tent to where the clowns line up prior to entering the show reveals the ugly truth:
While the economy is not likely to fall into a recession and send the unemployment rate soaring, the economy is not growing fast enough to meet the need for jobs from a growing labor force. As a result, unemployment will be going in the wrong direction for the rest of the year.
I am in the middle of reading a book entitled "Traitor To His Class" about Franklin Roosevelt. Repeatedly, I read about situations which I swear could have been culled from current-day news reports, complete with quotes from Republicans of up to 100 years ago which could have been uttered by today's conservative radicals without changing a single word. If I were an Obama adviser, I'd have him put down the books about Reagan and Lincoln and read up on a Democratic president who successfully dealt with the very problems now facing the Oval Office.
But we can't expect that of a 1985 moderate Reagan Republican, can we? (You can watch Obama say this about himself.) He firmly believes that austerity is the way to go, even if the portents don't advise the pain this course will inflict.
Instead, while Wall Street wallows in wealth, Obama works to take it away from Main Street. Defenders of the president continuously ignore how he does this. Richard Eskow points out how Democrats are fooling themselves:
Article comments
1 - troll
...both trains have the same destination - neither of their tracks leads to a just agenda - US party politics its punditry (Maddow and Klein not excepted) and its resulting government are of by and for the 1% who make the decisions about investment of surpluses
its a safe bet that the 99% will get as little of these as necessary to quell unrest...which apparently leaves lots of room for continued deconstruction of new deal safeguards
this should come as no surprise and there's no reason for optimism - its past time to shift the focus of progressive political action to the development of alternative forms of governance and mutual aid
(one thing to take away from the experiences of the occupy groups is that there is material support to be had from communities for social experiments)
support your local food-not-bombs group (for lack of better current options)
welcome back Realist
2 - roger nowosielski
Looks like you've just described a train wreck, troll . . .