Hightower: Jobless Suffer While the GOP Helps The Rich Stay Rich

[Joanne98]

As personal economies keep shriveling, politicians are more interested in comforting the comfortable.

The good news is that America’s economy continues to grow. The bad news is that most people’s personal economies continue to shrivel.

The June report on jobs glows with the happy news that America’s unemployment rate has fallen to 9.5 percent — the best we’ve had in a year! “We are headed in the right direction,” trumpeted President Obama.

Great … if true. However, the ballyhooed jobs statistic is a mirage. It looks good only because 650,000 more Americans became so frustrated with their fruitless search for work last month that they quit looking. In StatWorld, such “discouraged” seekers are — abracadabra! — no longer considered unemployed, even though they are. There are now 1.2 million Americans in this statistical purgatory.

http://bearmarketnews.wordpress.com/2010/07/17/hightower-jobless-people-suffer-while-the-gop-helps-the-rich-stay-rich/

[gateley]

1. It's not just the GOP - there are a few Dems who are lending a hand to the rich, too. nt

[DJ13]

2. Spot on

Yet, economists are cheerfully bandying around the most moronic oxymoron I’ve ever heard. They are exulting that we’re presently experiencing a “jobless recovery.”

I don’t see how their minds can put those two words together without having their heads explode! Excuse me, Einsteins, but there’s no such thing. You can spin your data till the cows come home, but an economy that has nearly 20 percent of the workforce either unemployed or underemployed, that has no plan for replacing the 8 million jobs we lost in the last two years, that is now proceeding with mass layoffs of such essential workers as teachers and firefighters and that is willing to accept poverty pay as the new American norm is not by any stretch of the imagination a recovery.

:thumbsup:

[slay]

3. Jim Hightower is a great voice for progressives and just plain common sense

k&R

[global1]

4. What Doesn't Equate For Me Is........

there are more poor and middle class voters that are getting squeezed and screwed by the GOP and those few Dems than the rich folk.

If I were a Senator or Congressman/woman - wouldn't that have to play into my equation for getting re-elected? If I stiff the poor and middle class - won't they vote me out of office?

I know that the rich have the money and that the Senators and Congresspeople cater to the rich for campaign contributions - but all the money in the world won't get me elected if the poor and middle class people are pissed and vote against me.

Why aren't the Sens & Reps worried about that?

[TomClash]

5. Because they are shapeshifters

They mask economic issues with race, nationalism, immigration, taxes, deficits - and anything else that will trick voters into voting against their economic interests.

Plus, often the Dems are no better, leading to despair among people who already have economically mediocre lives.