More cheery stories of the economic “‘recovery'”
For many Americans, ‘temp’ work becomes permanent way of life
Moving in with parents becomes more common for the middle-aged
Cheery stories, both, five years into the “‘recovery'”.
Every other story right now is a side-show to the big news, which is that the American economy is being hollowed out like a melon rind, and our elites just don’t care enough to even address the issue. I’d tell you to remember that come the fall election season, but that just doesn’t matter anymore either.
NOTE: I’m now using three marks for the opening and closing of the scare quotation marks around the word RECOVERY because two just don’t seem like enough.
UPDATE on a Theban Tragedy
Several months after I was PROMISED, one more time, that everything had been fixed, things aren’t fixed. I cannot believe … My frustration levels are really climbing. I have been trying to get this fixed for YEARS. YEARS! And they will not fix it.
I am starting to think of hiring an attorney to sue their goddamned dumb, evil asses for emotional distress. John Morgan is here in town, and he’s as scary a lawyer as you can find in the country. Yeah, maybe that’s what I need to do….
Not so fast with the optimism, buddy!
CAVEAT: I try to avoid political posts here at Ambiance. But today, as yesterday, there is some economic news worthy of note.
The new jobs report was released today. I have heard a few people make some optimistic noises about the fact that private sector jobs have matched the 2008 peak in terms of numbers. (See here, for example, though they do have the decency to caveat the hell out of the article.)
What I’m not hearing, and don’t expect to hear from the Administration, is a comment about full-time jobs. As of March 1 2014, the US economy had 3,872,000 FEWER full-time jobs than it did at its peak in November 2007. And that’s after almost five years of recovery.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/fredgraph.png?g=vV4
And given that the working age population has grown considerably in the intervening years, the employment situation is actually even worse than it appears.
So don’t let the bastards tell you how goddamned good we’ve got it, and what a wonderful job they’ve done. Because it just ain’t so.
(Sorry, I’ve been trying to get the graph to embed, but wordpress isn’t accepting the FRED site’s code. I’ll see what I can do to fix it later.)
That whooshing sound you hear …
… is the air being let out of the middle class. More and more people that DO have jobs are getting priced right out of the housing market.
People with money to burn, both domestic and foreign, are buying up all the property, leaving the middle class with nowhere to go. Make no mistake, our rulers on Wall Street and in DC are doing this deliberately, with an eye towards making certain that only Lords and Serfs remain.
Ambiance 
