Jobless Claims Jump, Philly Fed Index Shows Contraction

Just in case you're inclined to be as clueless about the seriousness of economic conditions as President Hopey/Changey, take a look at this mornings' business headlines:

Jobless claims jump to nine-month high
Initial filings up 12,000 in latest week to hit 500,000 mark, data show

Philly Fed Index shows contraction in August, first time since July 2009

U.S. stocks dig deeper hole after Philadelphia Fed drop

AIA: Architecture Billings Index shows contraction in July

Jobless claims need to be at or below 300,000 for there to be real job growth.

That claims are going the OTHER WAY and have hit 500,000 is very bad news indeed for the economy and the already unemployed.

If you're already an unemployed person, just try getting a job when more people are being laid off every week.

With economic activity as measured by the Philly Fed DECLINING (the index went from 5.1 reading in July to -7.7 in August), you can bet there will be more layoffs to come.

The August jobs report is going to be pretty bad.

The September and October reports may be even worse.

And President Obama and his yes boys and girls around him seem clueless - not only about what to do to spur job growth and economic activity, but clueless too about why the president's approval ratings have plummeted:

Democrats in Washington are divided and somewhat puzzled over President Obama’s fading popularity. They reject, of course, the Republican view that the president is basically a closet socialist whose disdain for free enterprise has alienated voters. But that’s about as far as the consensus goes.

In conversations over the past few weeks, some of the party’s leading strategists told me that it all comes down to messaging, or — here’s that ubiquitous word again — “framing.” The president who ran such a brilliant campaign, they argue, has utterly failed to communicate his successes. They cited factors like the president’s cool demeanor and suggested that he hadn’t used the right words or shown the proper empathy.

Uh, boys and girls at the White House, "framing the issues" and "showing empathy" are both important skills and/or qualities to have in politics and I would definitely say President Hopey/Changey is REALLY, REALLY bad at the empathy thing (he really does come across like he doesn't give a shit about anything except his next post-game cigarette with Arne Duncan), but the biggest, most important reason Obama's ratings have plummeted is THE FREAKING ECONOMY.

Jesus Christ, why can't these morons at the White House get their heads around the fact that no one outside the Village Hierarchy of Evan Thomas, David Broder and Jonathan Alter gives a shit that Obama got a bunch of legislation through.

What people care about are RESULTS.

How is the economy doing?

What's happening with employment?

Is my job safe?

Can I pay my mortgage and still buy food?

What are my health care costs like?

On ALL of these counts, Hopey/Changey has been a MISERABLE failure.

The economy got WORSE after he took office, steadied for a bit, and is getting WORSE again.

Unemployment, which the administration said would never get above 8% if Obama's stimulus package was passed, has held steady between 9.5% and 10% and is now RISING again as the economy worsens in the second half of the year.

And let's not forget that the unemployment rate is a BULLSHIT measure.

Underemployment - the number of people who are unemployed and looking for work, the number of people who are unemployed but have stopped looking for work BECAUSE THERE IS NONE, and the number of people who are working part-time but want full-time work - is at 19%.

Yeah - 19%.

Underemployment may hit 25% before long as layoffs ratchet up again and the economy continues to slow.

And let's not forget that states and municipalities haven't finished cutting hours and laying people off too.

Calculated Risk posts that California furloughs are back on again and Oregon is seeing a widening budget deficit and is considering cutting jobs and school and state services.

Conditions are growing worse.

People are scared.

Yet the man in charge in Washington - a fellow who has bragged about holding teachers accountable like no one has ever held them accountable before for stagnant test scores and poor graduation rates - can't seem to get his head around the fact that THE ECONOMIC DATA SUCKS and therefore people think HE SUCKS.

The Democratic Party will take it on the chin this November. They should. They have done little to mitigate the mortgage disaster, the unemployment problem, the way hedge fund criminals like Whitney Tilson use Wall Street like a Big Rigged Casino.

But the man who really deserves the accountability - President Obama - will not receive any this November. He and his political advisers have decided that losing the House to the GOP is EXACTLY what they want to happen.

That way they can run against the crazy Repubs running Congress who want to repeal the 14th Amendment and deport every Mexican busboy in every restaurant in the country just because they're, you know, Mexican.

But had President Obama actually used the economic crisis of 2008-2009 to reforge the bond between government and the people that FDR once built, to show Americans how government services can be used to help put people back to work, to increase economic activity, to make people's live better, we could have been in a better place economically and he could have been in a better place politically.

Instead we got that corporate-friendly THIRD WAY jive that Clinton was so fond of - if you add a government program, it must be in the form of some competitive grant that shifts the work to some private corporation because private enterprise is so much better than Big Government.

That's what Race to the Top was all about.

That's what so much of the stimulus stuff was.

You know, had they trained people to fix the infrastructure, the electrical grid, to repave roads that states can longer afford to keep paved, to make sure bridges in Minnesota (or anywhere else) do not collapse because they haven't been fixed, to build transit systems or fix existing ones, to build high speed rail along the Eastern Corridor so that people can travel rapidly and cheaply without going near an airport, Obama could have gone down into history as a great president who not only pulled the country out of the Great Recession but also made this country look great (and be safe) again.

Instead we got Race to the Top and the other jive. And Obama has 44% approval ratings and 500,000 new jobless claims this month and unemployment soon to reach 10% or higher again and GDP to hit 0%.

If the measures of accountability that the LA Times and the other ed deformers are using on teachers like a sledgehammer were applied to this president and the yes boys and girls around him, he would be vilified as the incompetent arrogant fool he is and out on his ass.

But I think we will have to wait until 2012 for that.

And unfortunately, as NYC Educator points out here, what comes AFTER Obama will be even worse.

It's a shame.

It didn't have to be this way.