although i certainly don't understand enough...my understanding today of economics and world events and policies is better than say, 20 years ago.

yet I recall that 20 years ago - i used to tell friends, from my own limited understanding view :

"the USA has become almost completely a SERVICE economy..one consisting of paper pushers..bean counters..glorified domestic servants of all definitions: "customer representative", nurses, health aides, doctors, accountants, "managers", "supervisors", "dispatchers", drivers, "hosts", "event planners", lifestyle designes, "leaders", "presidents of boards", "board members", "service staff", house cleaners, gardeners, etc....and above all: FINANCIERS, Finance Planners and managers, brokers, sellers of houses, "agents",
but everything is about "SERVICE ECONOMY" - nothing produced that is actual material commodities ..
or at least they are services that are quite normal and needed BUT do not correspond to a society that actually produces wealth of "growth" ..and yet the United States emphasises "Growth" -- -but must do so by borrowing , and "creating" wealth based on phantom "creations"...
but one problem of course is that MOST of the population in this service economy ALSO does not really get the wages or earnings in keeping with its MAJORITY in the population.
its value as "service" is diminished and the resulting "wealth" this "service economy" produces is eaten UPWARDS and nothing "trickles down" or as it should have begun with - spread more equitably among the majority of the "service economy".
and when that service economy has gained very little out of its "service" in its majority - it is forced to go into debt - reflected in government debt, corporate debt, business debt...because it has no REAL consumers that can REALLY afford what it "produces" or "services".
i thought, then, long ago - although just from that limited view that the USA had become nothing more than a glorified "servant" economy - serving an elite of "masters"...
that it would all collapse on itself - or come to a disastrous point.
"wealth" can not be sustained forever through the PRETENSE of "wealth" that is not REALLY there but only in the accounting books that are made out of thin air.
i also thought that the american system will become largely a system of redundancies...full of paper work , each step of the way , "creating" a new "profit" level or "product"
but really achieving no real wealth - and just exists for its own sake - just to push paper.

Do you notice something about the currencies (and governments) considered "ascending" and those declining? The ascending ones are backed by a "real" economy. Ours is now a management economy, and mostly what we manage is the global circulation of our currency. Few people openly discuss just how precarious what's left of our economy actually is. Certainly nobody in Washington of either major party. Certainly not Rush Limbaugh, or Keith Olbermann, and certainly not the common folk who are most in danger. You know, Main Street, Obama's Wall Street-funded, Madison Avenue crafted campaign mantra.

When we went off the gold standard, most informed people understood that gold was unnecessary for currency valuation, since there was an entire economy full of dollar-denominated assets backing our currency, and having just one asset define the currency was too constraining. Now the only dollar-denominated asset we have left is our real property, which is why land, buildings, and waterways are getting grabbed up by foreigners, especially sovereign wealth funds in oil-rich nations, where they're understandably getting antsy about holding too much of their cash reserves in dollars and are rushing, in cycles, to send them back to us. You only hear about it when we over-reach in trying to keep our currency stable by selling something to Arabs that scares us, like ports, and there's an outcry, but it's happening every day to other less security-sensitive property. Once we run out of real property to sell, that's when the collapse sets in, unless we hastily change our trade practices so we actually manufacture things for export again.

Demand for any currency is entirely dependent upon demand for goods sold in that currency. That's the part Thomas Friedman never tells you about when he's selling globalization to liberals. The only goods we export are weapons, of the armed forces and personal types, and that's why we can't stop proliferating arms -- without arms, we've got no consumer products that call back dollars when sold.

Our currency is hanging on by two fingernails -- one is real property, the other arms. Very tenuous situation. But if it all goes south, don't worry, because Obama's bailed out Wall Streeters will do just fine -- they'll trade whichever currency is in demand, because they're currency traders, and aren't trapped by dollars like the rest of us down on Main Street. In fact, Wall Street will come out better if the dollar plunges, because they only owe the taxpayers specific dollar amounts, even if the dollar is only worth 1% of what it was worth when they borrowed it.

It's the historic plight of the propertyless. Capital is mobile. Every trade agreement we've passed over the last 30 years has been to increase the mobility of capital, and they keep telling us it's good for everyone, and we keep believing it. But humans are not mobile. We not only have an economically hard time moving, but many of us actually like our home regions and want to stay. A piece of machinery doesn't have any attachment to the land. People do. We should have all known from the start that globalization was anti-American, but we tend to believe what the powerful tell us, because most of us identify with them more than with those with whom we hold everything in common. We think patriotism is what the mobile people tell us it is, rather than what's in the interest of the static people. We've been fleeced, and the people on Wall Street who fleeced us aren't going to get us out of it -- they're tied up completely in saving themselves, with our loans to them. They owe us money, not loyalty, and devalued money is all we'll get from them.

It was Bill Clinton who made the Democratic Party into the institution that facilitated this process. It's amazing how 8 years of Cheney left so many good people teary-eyed for Clinton. Ralph Nader told us this was happening in the mid-1990's while it was happening.

Good job, I like and agree with what you said.

30 years of Republican rule where laws were passed that deregulated labor laws, gave us free trade laws, and destroyed the unions in this country have finally done its job.

How many of the unemployed over the last 30 years voted for the Repubs and their God, Guns and Gays mantra? While these same folks were screaming and yelling about social issues, the Repubs were stabbing them in the back.

Even now, we see folks prancing around screaming about not wanting health care change while they themselves lack health insurance!!! All I can do is shake my head. We are only going to die anyway and here we are fighting about health care for sick folks!!!!!!!!! Too much!

These jobs have been permanently lost and those unemployed will never be hired back at their old positions. Unless they return to school for retraining in another field, they will never work again. That is reality. The good-paying union jobs in factories have been replaced by minimum-wage paying jobs in the service sector.

.
There will forever be a net loss of jobs going forward. Machines replace humans every day, for many reasons. We probably only need 30 or 40 million workers world wide to keep the planet functioning in a manner that lets us live our lives comfortably. We have 6.5 billion. That's a lot of "real" unemployment headed our way.

www.thevenusproject.com
.

What part of "jobless recovery" is it people don't understand?

The economy is recovering as long as bailed out banks make big profits and dole out big bonuses.

The same jobless recovery that we had under Bush.

This is a major change for our country. Michigan has 15% unemployment. The reality is that too many folks live in our state for the amount of jobs we have. My relatives came here prior to WWI for auto jobs and it worked quite well until the global world of work took hold.

I don't have any answers, but that is the reality of it.

.
"The reality is that too many folks live in our state for the amount of jobs we have. "

Close, but you're aiming too short.. aim higher. Here, I'll fix it for you..

The reality is that too many people live for the amount of jobs we have.

machines do it faster, better, and more reliably. We use factories to make stuff, and we make a lot more than people need (need being carefully chosen as a word). Since most of it is made without human hands being needed, humans aren't needed in our current system (for anything but buying.. but you can't buy if you don't work).

We have breached a new age. We have production without the need for humans, which means we have no need for humans. But, without humans buying, we have no need to make (most of what we produce).. it was the excess stuff that no one needed that built the framework of our current economy, and since we don't need people to make, and people can't buy what they don't need, our current economy will crash and burn (completely). It was not sustainable, and the move to global markets to increase profits was the straw that broke our back.

www.thevenusproject.com
.

This is a joke right? I wish the media would start publishing the real unemployment numbers and maybe they would stop saying we are in a recovery of course that will never happen. This is a depression and things are not going to get better until we stop selling out our workforce to china and india. Drop the WTO, establish a 30% tarrif on ALL imports from china. Isn't it a great thing we have such low cost goods but no jobs to buy anything. I personally would rather pay a little extra for things as long as there were jobs here at home.

Tell that to the Republicans.

Since Congress can't do anything useful about unemployment, it's time for we the people to face it with our own ingenuity:

http://bit.ly/ozqT6

(satire)

So the numbers that came out a few days ago were completely wrong??

No. That was liberal media spin. We may have lost fewer jobs but we still LOST jobs. And they were all talking it up as the economy was turning around. Perhaps it's good news in that if you are one of the newly unemployeed, you'll have enough extended benefits to carry you through until the economy really does turn around.

I heard somewhere that when the new claims get below 400,000, that will mean a net increase in new jobs. So continue to watch unemployment climb. And, if it continues at .4% per month, then, well, you do the math.

My boss told be our company was going to try and hold off hiring anyone until next year's mid term elections. He said the "powers that be" don't want our economic situation to show any signs of improvement under Obama until they can regain a Republican majority. Then they'll be able to easily defeat everything the Dems and Obama try to advance.

RIGGGHHHHTTTTT! The Republican's are secretly negotiating with your company, and presumably the entire business community, to NOT hire solely to take back the congress in 12 months.

WOW! Keep on crawling down that rabbit hole and we'll fill it in when you get laid off.

.
Actually, manager types tend to be Republican types. Good at giving orders and making command decisions, but bad at actually figuring out problems and fixing things.. workers and engineers do the hard work, managers just tell you to work harder for less while they get cushy bonuses and company funded (at tax payer expense, ultimately) vacations.

And I've actually heard some die-hard "I got mine, f*ck you!" types talk just like morphula suggests. it's not a secret negotiation, it's their common mentality.

Will Economy undo Obama & Democrats?

http://www.youpolls.com/details.asp?pid=6445

.

Blame both parties but blame Clinton the most. He is the guy who gave the Democratic Party to Wall Street and to the internationals. He talked a liberal game while he was doing harm to the American working class including Blacks and Hispanics. Obama is just following what he thinks is a winner. 19 percent unemployment and we are still recruiting H1 Visa workers, Green Card workers, allowing 12 million or so illegal workers into the country and we are still outsourcing jobs to third world sweat shops.

.
"The economy grew at a 3.5 percent annualized rate in the July-September period, probably ending the most painful U.S. recession in 70 years."

LMFAO.. see, when you're too stupid to understand that the economy did NOT grow, but that the "books" looked better now that trillions and trillions of taxpayer dollars bailed out the banks, then perhaps this was "unexpected"..

We saw the recession coming, and told you.. you said it was fine. We said it was going to be bad, and you said it was fine. We're telling you it's not over because nothing has fundamentally changed, and you say it's fine. You will continue to have "unexpected results" for as long as you keep your head up your ass and refuse to look around.

When does a "massive recession" become a "depression"? Because we've been RECESSING for over a year, and we're not positioned to come out any time soon. And just like the lead up to the '30s, deregulation and trusting the Fed put us here.