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Ed Schultz takes Fox News to task in his Psycho Talk segment for this--Fox News’ New Idea For Fighting Unemployment: Decrease The Minimum Wage:

Back in July, when a scheduled increase in the minimum wage from $6.55 to $7.25 per hour was about to take place, Fox News ran a segment examining how “the hike will hurt,” joining a media chorus about the supposed detrimental effect the increase would have on business hiring.

Now, with its Republican-inspired “Where are the jobs?” campaign in full swing, Fox has gone “on the job hunt” with a “new” idea for increasing employment: cutting the minimum wage. Jumping off from an op-ed by Washington Post editorial board member Charles Lane, Fox yesterday ran a handful of segments on the same basic premise — cutting the minimum wage may be the answer to the jobs dilemma.

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Isn't that great news? He also told George Stephanopoulos on This Week there will be "growth in the spring." (Just like Chauncy Gardiner in "Being There.")

But it isn't true. The recession isn't over until jobs increase, and that's not really happening. Summers is saying we "only" lost 11,000 jobs last month, and that's not exactly true. The numbers were brought down by a number of factors, including the large numbers of people who have given up and stopped looking for work.

Nonetheless, everyone agrees Larry Summers is a Very Serious Person, so I will take his word for it and just sit here, waiting for my pony.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And Mr. Summers, let me begin with you, and let's start with just the overall economic situation right now, especially on jobs. We saw that drop in unemployment in November, but private economists predict that unemployment is likely to head back up. Mark Zandi sees it peaking at about 10.6 percent next year. Others say it could go up to 11 percent. Is that in line with your forecast?

SUMMERS: George, here is what I know. We were talking about depression, we were talking about the financial system collapsing. Today, everybody agrees that the recession is over, and the question is what the pace of the expansion is going to be. These things happen in stages. First, GDP goes up. That has happened. Then, hours that are worked by workers who already have jobs go up. That's starting to happen. Then employment goes up. We got very close to that this year, this month, with only 11,000 jobs lost. And then unemployment starts to come down. So these problems weren't made in a month or a year, and they are going to take a substantial time to solve. But what we can take satisfaction from is that we've walked back from the brink. And you know, forget what we say. Most professional forecasters are now looking for a return to job growth by spring.

Now, when job growth starts, more people are going to be looking for work, so it will take a little longer for the unemployment statistics to come down, but make no mistake, we were losing 700,000 a month when President Bush turned the economy over to President Obama. The number last month was 11,000.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me pin you down on that, though. You believe the economy is actually going to be creating jobs in the spring.

SUMMERS: That is the judgment of most professional forecasters. That's right, George.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So given that...

SUMMERS: If you look at the employment statistics, they will show employment growth. They were showing losing 700,000 a month. Last month, they showed losing 11,000 jobs. They will bounce from month to month, but I believe that, as do most professional forecasters, that by spring, employment growth will start to be turning positive.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So given that, we saw the president allowed some job creation ideas earlier this week. What is the upper limit on what he will sign into law in terms of new job creation measures early next year? $100 billion?

SUMMERS: The president is going to work with Congress to do what's necessary. George, it's a bit of a Washington thing to put this in terms of price tags. For example, the president is doing a whole set of things, working with other...

STEPHANOPOULOS: But the American people want to...

(CROSSTALK)

STEPHANOPOULOS: It's not a Washington thing.

SUMMERS: To promote our exports. That doesn't have a -- that does not have a direct cost. But the president has talked about doing things for infrastructure. It doesn't cost anything to encourage banks, as the president will be doing, to meet their responsibilities and expand the flow of credit to small business.

We're in a very different -- we are in a very special kind of economic situation, and frankly, jobs have to be the top priority, and every bill is going to be a jobs bill going forward. We hope we can find common ground. We emphasize support for small businesses, repairing the nation's infrastructure. These ought to be things that everybody can agree on.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, let me just pin you down, though, one more time on that. You did lay out a number of ideas that don't cost money, but extending unemployment costs money. Aid to states and local governments costs more money. Investing in infrastructure costs money. So what is the upper limit on what President Obama will sign?

SUMMERS: The president is going to do what's necessary to respond to this crisis. He's put a figure of $50 billion on the infrastructure support that he proposes. His proposals on unemployment insurance are primarily a continuation of the legislation that the Congress has already passed and that has been put in place. And he recognizes that when we take new steps, we have to do it in the context of a framework that is fiscally responsible. We can't just look in isolation at one measure. We've got to look at the $8 trillion in deficit over the next 10 years that the president inherited, and start making progress with respect to those deficits. That's what the president did in his budget. That's what the health care bill does with the most consequential set of health care reforms that have ever been put forward, and they are now on the brink of passage.

It sounds like a really good idea. But really, this is bribery. And it wouldn't have been necessary to give them everything they want if Geithner and pals put reasonable conditions on the bank bailout in the first place:

The Obama administration is developing a major initiative to tackle the economic and political problem of unemployment by getting federal bailout funds into the hands of small businesses.

The proposal involves spinning off a new entity from the Troubled Assets Relief Program that could give banks access to the government money without restrictions, such as limits on executive pay, as long as they use it to make loans to small businesses. But officials are not yet certain whether carving the program out of TARP would be the best way to lure banks to participate in small-business lending, said sources familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plans were not final.

As an alternative, officials are prepared to ask Congress to modify TARP itself, easing the pay limits and other restrictions that would be imposed on small-business lenders taking the money, the sources said.

Since the summer, the administration has been facing an uncomfortable dynamic in the economy. The ranks of the jobless have been growing, while big financial firms that got taxpayer bailout money have been thriving. In response, officials have been trying to recast TARP as aid for Main Street rather than Wall Street.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told a congressional oversight panel Thursday that TARP would focus on aiding small-business lending, community banks and homeowners struggling to keep up with their mortgage payments, and he hinted at the new program.

Banks are "very reluctant to come and do business with the government and they're concerned that, if they come, they will be stigmatized and they will be subject to the risk of conditions in the future that might make it harder for them to run their businesses," Geithner told the TARP oversight panel. Solving that problem, he added, is "going to be something we cannot do on our own. It's going to require some help from Congress to help deal with those basic concerns."

Elizabeth Warren, who heads the oversight panel, chided Geithner for taking so long in setting up several other small-business lending initiatives, two of which were announced last spring.

"It's not news to anyone that small-business lending is important," she said. "Small businesses are closing every day. But Treasury has now announced three plans and clearly has not gotten the job done."

Thom Hartmann and Bay Buchanan discuss our immigration policy and I agree with Thom when he said he never thought he'd agree with Bay Buchanan about anything. I found myself agreeing more than disagreeing here as well. Hartmann was spot on though with how to solve the problem if the government was actually interested in protecting American jobs. Go after the employers rather than the workers and fix our trade laws. Buchanan (surprise, surprise) wanted to focus in the immigration problem. Must run in the family.

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Robert Reich reiterated what he wrote at his blog today to Ed Schultz--The President's Job's Initiative Doesn't Measure Up:

No president in modern times walks a tightrope as exquisitely as this one. His balance is a thing of beauty. But when it comes to this economy right now -- an economy fundamentally out of balance -- we need a federal government that moves boldly and swiftly to counter-balance the huge recessionary forces still at large.

States and cities, for example, are estimated to be $350 billion hole this year and next. They can't run deficits so they're wildly cutting spending, cutting jobs, cutting contracts, and raising taxes and fees. That's a huge anti-stimulus package roughly as big as the remaining direct spending in the old federal stimulus package. Which means, Obama's "new" stimulus, announced today, is about all we have, and it's not nearly enough.

[...]

There is no reason to tolerate this degree of misery. We know exactly what to do. The government has the fiscal tools to do it. Start by bailing out state and local governments (if Congress would prefer to call it a loan and require payback over the next five years, fine). Renew unemployment and COBRA benefits. Increase federal spending on infrastructure. If we have to, hire people directly. The package should be $400 billion over two years.

When Ed Schultz noted that the credit markets need to be loosened up for small businesses and that he thought the TARP money should be used for that and not only for government jobs, Reich responded:

Ed it is the right thing to do. I wish though when we bailed out the big banks, one of the reasons we bailed out the big banks was so they would turn around and provide credit for small businesses. Actually nothing like that happened. We bailed out the big banks and now we're bailing out small businesses.

Just one more of the many strings that should have been attached to that money. Of course the Republicans won't want to go along with any of it and scream more about the need for deficit reductions. Unless of course that interferes with tax cuts for the rich or military spending. Then the sky's the limit and deficits don't matter.

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(The Wolf at the front door is starting to look like the family pet)

The never ending story of the Economy, and the ever perplexing world of Reaganomics of the 1980s. Probably not a revelatory view, but one given by Donald C. Platten, who was in 1983 Chairman and CEO of Chemical Bank. The interview via CBS News Face The Nation on August 14, 1983 gives some indication where things were heading.

Donald Platten (Chemical Bank): “The feeling I personally go to bed with every night is that the economy will shortly stop being in a recovery mode, in other words we will have reached the former peak of the economy and that there will be a growth that we’ll be able to talk about as far as our economy in the months ahead. I think what is going on now in the economy is very healthy. I don’t think we have to worry about it being over exuberant. I think there will be a good economy going from now right straight through the year end into 1984. I think there will be pauses. I think in certain industries there’s going to be really no basic recovery in a significant way. I’m afraid that the problem of unemployment is going to continue with us for some time to come, and that really is the biggest thing in the country today. We’ve dispensed with the word Inflation, really. It’s a non-subject, why? Because it’s down to around 3 to 4 percent as against 14 percent a couple of years, so now the unemployment factor is the one that’s on most peoples minds. And that is going to continue down as the economy continues to grow, that it will not affect everybody as well as some other people, there’s no question about that.”

Hindsight and the reading of Tea Leaves. Twenty-six years ago they were doing it. Twenty-six years later, they still are.

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Dr. Nancy Snyderman talked to Sen. Judd Gregg about his stalling tactics in the Senate to hold up the debate on the health care bill, and after a great deal of filibustering and feigned indignation from Gregg Snyderman followed up by asking Gregg this:

Snyderman: But Senator let me just ask you a question. We just listened to the President talk about jobs. We know people continue to lose their jobs, which means they’re losing their health care. So what do you say to the average American who’s played by all the rules who can’t have the same health care that you have and you’re one of our elected officials?

Gregg: Well, you know if he works for the government he’ll get the same I have. I mean I have the same health care as a person who works for The Secret Service, works for the FBI or works down at the local Federal Building. I mean I don’t have anything different than what an average federal employee has.

I actually proposed a bill which I wish had been incorporated into this which said that people would be able to have the option of the FEHB program which is the Federal Health and Benefit Program and I’m cosponsor of a bill which does the same thing. That’s not really the issue here. The issue here is how you do it affordably. How do you do a health reform process which is step-by-step takes on issues that can improve health care, expand its coverage rather than proposing this massive bill which as I said grows the government in the largest way we’ve ever grown. It’s $2.5 trillion and at the same time in my opinion will put the government basically in charge of health care because that’s the ultimate goal here—move the government into health care, give us a single payer system.

Think Progress posted the first part of Gregg's reply here--Gregg’s Health Care Solution: ‘If You Work For The Government, You’ll Have The Same Health Care I Have’ and had this response to the interview:

It’s puzzling that Gregg — who regularly slams “spending beyond our means for big government programs” — would say that anyone who wants health care coverage like his should simply work for the federal government. Certainly, Gregg wouldn’t advocate that we grow the size of government by employing the tens of millions of Americans who are uninsured in order to provide them health care. Or would he?

They did not include the latter part of Gregg's response where he touts a bill he co-sponsored as a means for everyone to receive the same health care benefits as federal employees. There's just one problem with that. From Ezra Klein:

The plan has a lot more fake support than it has real support. If every Republicans who has co-sponsored W-B would commit to voting for it, the plan might pass. But they haven't.

So Gregg cites a bill he co-sponsored but never committed to voting for instead of admitting what the Republican Party’s actual solution is for health care reform—do nothing and sabotage anything the Democrats try to do for political gain. It sure can't be because the Democrats haven't shown the insurance industry enough love in the bill they're trying to get through the Senate.

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(When the collective psyche was overrun by Pokemon)

Only ten years ago - the Friday after Thanksgiving 1999. In retrospect, not much has changed, if you discount the Christmas ads starting just before Halloween, the lines forming in front of shopping malls and Walmarts before midnight - the twenty-four hour shopping, the conspicuous consumption, the unemployment, the numbers of bankrupt stores.

No, in 1999 it was considered an event, the real conspicuous consumption would take place ten days before Christmas as it always had. In 1999 consumer confidence was high, the stock market was barreling towards 10,000 and online shopping was a nice idea, but would never replace good ol' retail.

Lou Miliano (CBS News): “This is no longer the busiest shopping day over recent years. Most purchasing has been done ten days prior to Christmas. This has become more of an event. And with unemployment down and stock prices up and consumer confidence strong, retailers are hoping it’s an event that leads to a 5-6% increase in sales.”

Black Friday hadn't been invented yet - the world was dealing with Pokemon and the dreaded Y2K, just around the corner.

Times change, and in strange ways.

My landlady told me a few days ago how surprised she was to hear an interview on the local NPR station with two families from our neighborhood, who were some of the 100 local families using a local church's food bank. When I saw her the next day, she said she'd mentioned the story to a friend who belongs to that church, and the friend told her the story was wrong: There are actually 200 families using the food bank.

I'm going to go through my cabinets and see what I can spare. In the meantime, I thought I'd remind readers how many of our neighbors are struggling through these desperate times. If you can still afford to give anything, please go through your cupboards and donate this week to your local food bank.

If you don't know of one, you can look for them here. You can also contact them if you need help for yourself or your family (in many states, you can also call 211 to see what services are available):

Feeding America

Pantry Net

Angel Food Ministries

Foodpantries.org

The Harry Chapin Food Bank (Northwest Florida)

The Chester County Food Bank (PA)

New York State Regional Food Banks

Food Bank NYC

Northern Illinois Food Bank

North Texas Food Bank

There are, of course, thousands more food banks around the country. If you know of one you'd like to recommend, please leave a link in the comments.

I can just hear Rush Limbaugh now: "If they're so hungry, how did they get so fat?" And our side's not much better, because of course they're going to agree with the Republicans that the best way to handle the problem is with tax cuts and deficit reduction.

I think I need to bang my head against a wall now:

The nation's economic crisis has catapulted the number of Americans who lack enough food to the highest level since the government has been keeping track, according to a new federal report, which shows that nearly 50 million people -- including almost one child in four -- struggled last year to get enough to eat.

At a time when rising poverty, widespread unemployment and other effects of the recession have been well documented, the report released Monday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture provides the government's first detailed portrait of the toll that the faltering economy has taken on Americans' access to food.

The magnitude of the increase in food shortages -- and, in some cases, outright hunger -- identified in the report startled even the nation's leading anti-poverty advocates, who have grown accustomed to longer lines lately at food banks and soup kitchens. The findings also intensify pressure on the White House to fulfill a pledge to stamp out childhood hunger made by President Obama, who called the report "unsettling."

The data show that dependable access to adequate food has especially deteriorated among families with children. In 2008, nearly 17 million children, or 22.5 percent, lived in households in which food at times was scarce -- 4 million children more than the year before. And the number of youngsters who sometimes were outright hungry rose from nearly 700,000 to almost 1.1 million.

I thought this was the most important finding:

The report's main author at USDA, Mark Nord, noted that other recent research by the agency has found that most families in which food is scarce contain at least one adult with a full-time job, suggesting that the problem lies at least partly in wages, not entirely an absence of work.

Salon: Get the smelling salts...A Republican voted for the House Dems health bill!

Free Thought Manifesto: One Nation, Under Illusion

The Political Carnival: The lying, self-absorbed little death panel-monger is at it again

Scott Horton: More on the Verdict in Milan

James Fallows: Unemployment and airplane crashes

Digital Life: Better the broken Windows than life with the Mac monks

Paul Krugman explains why we can't settle for stabilizing the economy, and says unless there's a bigger economic stimulus package, high unemployment is here to stay for a long, long time:

The effects of the stimulus will build over time — it’s still likely to create or save a total of around three million jobs — but its peak impact on the growth of G.D.P. (as opposed to its level) is already behind us. Solid growth will continue only if private spending takes up the baton as the effect of the stimulus fades. And so far there’s no sign that this is happening.

So the government needs to do much more. Unfortunately, the political prospects for further action aren’t good.

What I keep hearing from Washington is one of two arguments: either (1) the stimulus has failed, unemployment is still rising, so we shouldn’t do any more, or (2) the stimulus has succeeded, G.D.P. is growing, so we don’t need to do any more. The truth, which is that the stimulus was too little of a good thing — that it helped, but it wasn’t big enough — seems to be too complicated for an era of sound-bite politics.

But can we afford to do more? We can’t afford not to.

High unemployment doesn’t just punish the economy today; it punishes the future, too. In the face of a depressed economy, businesses have slashed investment spending — both spending on plant and equipment and “intangible” investments in such things as product development and worker training. This will hurt the economy’s potential for years to come.

Deficit hawks like to complain that today’s young people will end up having to pay higher taxes to service the debt we’re running up right now. But anyone who really cared about the prospects of young Americans would be pushing for much more job creation, since the burden of high unemployment falls disproportionately on young workers — and those who enter the work force in years of high unemployment suffer permanent career damage, never catching up with those who graduated in better times.

Even the claim that we’ll have to pay for stimulus spending now with higher taxes later is mostly wrong. Spending more on recovery will lead to a stronger economy, both now and in the future — and a stronger economy means more government revenue. Stimulus spending probably doesn’t pay for itself, but its true cost, even in a narrow fiscal sense, is only a fraction of the headline number.

O.K., I know I’m being impractical: major economic programs can’t pass Congress without the support of relatively conservative Democrats, and these Democrats have been telling reporters that they have lost their appetite for stimulus.

But I hope their stomachs start rumbling soon. We now know that stimulus works, but we aren’t doing nearly enough of it. For the sake of today’s unemployed, and for the sake of the nation’s future, we need to do much more.

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From Sen. Bernie Sanders and Brave New Films.

Bernie Sanders Unfiltered-The Dow and the Down and Out:

While markets surged past 10,000, the official unemployment rate stood near 10 percent. The United States is in a unique historical position. People on top are doing extraordinarily well, but in the real world the middle class is collapsing. The top 1 percent owns more wealth then the bottom 90 percent. CEOs of large corporations earn 400 times what their workers make. That is not what America is supposed to be about. With all the issues we are dealing with -- from health care to global warming to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – please do not forgot what is happening to tens of millions of our brothers and our sisters out there who are struggling hard to keep their heads above water.

Things are tough all over...unless, of course you're one of the elites.

Not one of those liberal elites Fox News is always grumbling about. But the true elites. You know, the ones who get bonuses bigger than the ones they received last year despite being bailed out by the Feds. Or who post record profits despite a soft economy and record gas prices. Or who complain that they can't possibly compete with a federal public option, despite having a literal cartel and a near monopoly. Those who tell you that the problems in this country can be blamed on labor unions, illegal immigrants, lazy people who won't try harder to get off unemployment rolls, or gay people who want to have their partnerships legally recognized.

What do those elites have in common?

Greed. Simple, all-American greed.

In the last thirty years, greed has over taken our society and economy, grabbing our politicians, our media and too many people for whom the benefits don't trickle down into their Chicago School of Economics/Friedmanesque/free market-worshipping grasp. We have gone from Gordon Gecko's "Greed is good" to the GOP's implicit mantra "Greed is patriotic" and that force to get the most for ourselves, the hell with everyone else has driven this country to the brink of a second great depression and all but killed our middle class.

Jonathan Tasini has chronicled the reasons and people responsible for the looting of America in his new book, The Audacity of Greed. The corporate executives who bust unions and lay off workers while jet-setting in their multi-million lifestyles; the politicians too beholden to corporate interests to regulate industries to protect Americans to the media that reinforces and celebrates the robbing of average Americans as something to which one should aspire.

From Jonathan's official bio:

Jonathan Tasini is executive director of the Labor Research Association. The longtime president of the National Writers Union, he was the lead plaintiff in Tasini vs. The New York Times, the landmark electronic rights case that took on the corporate media's assault on the rights of freelance authors. In 2006 he ran against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for the US Senate in New York. He has written about labor and economics for a variety of publications including The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal, and has appeared on CNBC and Fox News. He is currently challenging Kirsten Gillibrand for the 2010 Democratic nomination for US Senate from New York.

Howie Klein has an autographed copy of The Audacity of Greed that we will be giving out to the C&Ler whom Jonathan has determined asked the best question.

So with that, please join me in welcoming Jonathan Tasini to C&L.

From John L. Perry at Newsmax:

There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America's military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the Obama problem. Don't dismiss it as unrealistic.

America isn't the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn't mean it wont. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it. So, view the following through military eyes:

Did you get that? Perry doesn't advocate a military overthrow of the Obama administration, he's...just sayin'. Does anyone doubt that we'll see "military coup" signs at the next tea party? Mr. Perry believes he has the pulse of our military, but his assumptions go beyond the pale, straining the limits of credulity:

Top military officers can see the Constitution they are sworn to defend being trampled as American institutions and enterprises are nationalized.

They can see that Americans are increasingly alarmed that this nation, under President Barack Obama, may not even be recognizable as America by the 2012 election, in which he will surely seek continuation in office.

They can see that the economy ravaged by deficits, taxes, unemployment, and impending inflation is financially reliant on foreign lender governments. Read on...

There are so many flaws in this clown's logic, I don't know where to begin. What he's actually describing is George Bush's presidency, not Barack Obama's. If you can stand to click through to Perry's article, I would be most interested to hear your thoughts on his assumptions. As Jamie asked -- can you say treason?

Also worth remembering: Rush Limbaugh actually promoted this idea a few months ago.