1000 jobs

reprinted from Return of the Radical
As many of you know, and as some of you have surmised, I am still not working. (That would have been a banner headline.) I don't feel so bad about it, though, because no one else seems to be working, either.

A grand total of one thousand jobs were created, nationwide, in December. That is a net figure, which means that if 10,000 jobs were actually created, it was offset by 9,000 being lost. This during the Holiday season, when new jobs are supposed to be created hand over fist. In fact, according to Daily Kos, analysts were predicting 100-150 times that many jobs would be created. (It's entirely possible that the only jobs created were for analysts looking at job statistics...)

The unemployment rate dropped to 5.7 percent in December, but clearly that's due to benefits running out and not the mass employment of one thousand people.

This economy isn't anemic, it's dangerous. More than three million jobs have been lost under President Bush, and while not all of them can be credited to his economic policies, most of them can. Bush has done nothing to promote small businesses, or to punish corporations for moving operations overseas (or for much of anything, really; never forget that Ken Lay was an advisor to the Bush campaign and remained an advisor after Bush was sworn in).

Something is broken in America, and President Bush and his Merry Men don't know how to fix it. We need to get someone to Washington who does.