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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.

[H/t Media Matters.]

As one might expect, Glenn Beck has been simply cowardly about dealing with that report from the ADL titled "Rage Grows in America", which singled him out for special attention as the nation's newest "fearmonger in chief".

Beck has been largely silent about it. He only obliquely referenced it on his Fox News show earlier this week, exclaiming that "they" call him "anti-government" and heatedly denying that he is.

But on his radio show on Wednesday, he finally crawled out of his shell a little more, drawn out by a Timothy Rutten column in the Los Angeles Times discussing the report:

Beck: I'm just looking at a story from the Los Angeles Times today. The headline has my name in it, but it's really about you: "Who's watching Glenn Beck?" And then it goes into the -- "Much like the Depression-era demagogue from -- uh, Father Charles Coughlin" --

Anybody who knows history -- yeah. Yeah. I'm just like that guy.

Um -- "Fox is promoting a mass movement. Should his bosses be pulling the plug on him?" "For nearly a century, the Anti-Defamation League" -- which has as much to do, I believe, with the plight of the Jewish people as the National Organization of Woman has with the plight of women -- it is nothing, I believe, nothing but a political organization at this point. And I -- it, it kills me to say that.

I mean -- for the love of Pete, name the person that has been more friendly to Israel. Name the person that has spoken out more against the Holocaust deniers that are running Iran. Name the person who has stood up for Israel more than I have! Name the person in the mainstream media that speaks as passionately as I do -- not for some glorified Israel Zionist movement, but because I see the Jewish people as people! And the leaders of Iran as monsters that want to finish the job that Hitler started. You name the media person, Anti-Defamation League.

Well, first things first: Nevermind how obtuse a person must be who is neither a woman nor a Jew passing judgment on whether organizations with established histories of effectively fighting for the rights of either group has "anything to do" with their "plight." What really stands out about this rant is the stereotyped image Beck has of Jews, to wit, the only aspect of their "plight" worth mentioning is the defense of Israel.

In reality, the ADL has historically been focused on the much broader "plight" of the Jews represented by anti-Semitism and its pernicious effects. As you can see from just visiting the "About" section of their website, the ADL was founded primarily to combat anti-Semitism. Yes, the defense of Israel is in fact a concern of the ADL's -- but it is only one of many items on its agenda.

Beck, in fact, is clearly suggesting that anti-Semitism isn't a problem for Jews, except as it relates to Israel. (Beck has a thing about Iran that's actually a bad case of evangelical apocalypticism.) But in the USA, the problem of anti-Semitism has little if anything to do with Israel, and almost everything to do with the spread of right-wing hatemongers, who spread their poison through the very conspiracy theories and fearmongering scenarios and McCarthyite scenes that are Glenn Beck's stock in trade.

Now, let's take a look at that Tim Rutten column, especially because Beck never really did explain to his audience exactly what the piece said.

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(Hartzell Strathdene "Tiny" Parham - one of the most overlooked and neglected figures in early Chicago Jazz)

Back to Jazz tonight - this time it's Tiny Parham, one of the most innovative and obscure figures in the "South Side Chicago Jazz" scene of the 1920s, who has sadly and strangely been almost totally overlooked by critics and neglected even by early Jazz enthusiasts. Why? I couldn't possibly tell you. Parham recorded several sides for a number of record companies between 1926 and 1940 with his biggest popularity during the 1920s. After the depression hit, and dates became scarce, Parham's popularity began to slide into obscurity. Parham died on April 4, 1943.

This track, The Head Hunter's Dream comes from his 1928-1929 period recording for Victor Records and this session comes from July 2, 1928.

I guess it goes to prove you can still be great and nobody knows you.

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Countdown's Worst Persons segment for Oct. 5, 2009 with winner Rep. Paul Broun. Runners up George Will and Rush Limbaugh.

I always ask teabaggers when I run into them, how any federal deficit has hurt them personally? They can't respond to that. They have no answer except to cry "socialism."

Sure, it's much better to have a surplus like Clinton did, but these same deficit hawks were quite happy when the Bush tax cuts came down and the rich got richer and the economy collapsed. But I ask again: How has deficit spending hurt you?

Long term debt is nothing to sneeze at, but when we're talking about reforming health care for America, who really cares if it's $700 billion for 10 years or $1 trillion or $1.5 trillion? (By the way, I love the way the press never tells America what it would cost per year because then the figure doesn't sound so bad. They make it appear that the cost is $700 or 900 billion a year.)

Go ask a teabagger about costs and see what they say. What will it matter in the long run? We can figure out how to pay for it. Even FDR was hampered by these deficit hawks when he brought the country out of the Great Depression, and now these deficit hawks almost put us back into a Depression because they were so deficit crazy.

The deficit hawk is code for keeping the rich---rich. And then finding ways to keep their money pouring in.

Digby has a great post up today about costs:

The Peterson Foundation is ready with the news. They released a report (pdf) on the Kennedy Bill today...

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The fact is that if all these benefits were actually realized, the country would be far, far better off, both financially and otherwise. Nobody expects that spending will go down, merely that the growth in spending will be less. Therefore, if the government finds itself having to pay out all that money in health care benefits, this healthier, more prosperous nation can surely afford to levy the necessary taxes to pay for it, right?

I don't give a damn what this is going to cost in 2029. And nobody else should either because these projections are based on bullshit. Nobody can see that far into the future. If we can pay for it now, then we should do it now. And if it costs more down the line, then we will find a way to pay for it. This nonsensical obsession with deficits decades into the future is nothing more than a scam designed to keep the gravy train going for the wealthiest Americans at the expense of everyone else.

If these numbers are correct, then the fiscal scolds are going to have to argue that people today have to die so that wealthy people in 2029 don't have to pay higher taxes. It's that simple.

The president is also talking about having a deficit neutral bill, but he's being attacked for it by the usual suspects.

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(FDR - answering the well-upholstered whiners)

During the last few days of the 1936 Presidential campaign, FDR spoke at a rally in Wooster Massachusetts on October 21, 1936, answering Republican charges he mishandled the recovery that pulled the country out of depression. It was a familiar complaint:

FDR:

“Three and a half years ago we declared war on the Depression. And you and I know today that war is being won. But now comes that familiar figure, the well-upholstered hindsight critic. He tells us that out strategy was wrong, that the cost was too great, that something else won the war. That is an argument as old as the remorse of those who had their chance and muffed it.”

You'd think, 73 years later there would be a different story. But no.

I guess the upholstery just doesn't change.

The truth may set you free, but not if you're a Republican and the subject is taxes. After all, 95% of American families as promised received a tax cut from the Obama stimulus package. And while three-quarters of Americans support President Obama's proposal to roll back the Bush tax cuts for those earning over $250,000 to their Clinton-era levels, it turns out that affluent voters, too, chose Barack Obama over John McCain. Making matters worse, a Gallup poll Monday revealed that Americans' "views of income taxes among most positive since 1956."

So as their furious followers head off to their April 15th orgy of tea-bagging, the leadership of the GOP and its amen corner in the right-wing media have instead turned to tall tales on taxes.

Here, then, are 10 Republican Tax Day lies:

1. President Obama will raise taxes on small businesses.
2. The estate tax devastates small businesses and family farms.
3. 40% of Americans pay no taxes.
4. Tax cuts always increase revenue.
5. The GOP is the party of fiscal discipline.
6. Ronald Reagan was the greatest tax cutter of all time.
7. FDR caused the Great Depression, or at least made it worse.
8. Obama's cap-and-trade plan will cost each American family $3,100 a year.
9. Obama's tax proposals will undermine charitable giving.
10. The rich pay too much in taxes already.

For the details behind each of the GOP's Tax Day deceits, continue reading.

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I've sent out more than a hundred resumes since last year, and I've gotten exactly one callback. And it's not as if I'm being fussy, either. Yeah, it's pretty ugly out there:

WASHINGTON - In the coming weeks and months, hundreds of thousands of jobless Americans will exhaust their unemployment benefits, just when it's never been harder to find a job.

Congress extended unemployment aid twice last year, allowing people to draw a total of up to 59 weeks of benefits. Now, as the recession drags on, a rolling wave of people who were laid off early last year will lose them.

Precise figures are hard to determine, but Wayne Vroman, an economist at the Urban Institute, estimates that up to 700,000 people could exhaust their extended benefits by the second half of this year.

Some will find new jobs, but prospects will be grim: Layoffs are projected to go on, and many economists expect the jobless rate, already at 8.5 percent, to hit 10 percent by year's end.

"It's going to be a monstrous problem," Vroman said.

U.S. employers shed 663,000 jobs in March, and the jobless rate now stands at its highest in a quarter-century. Since the recession began in December 2007, a net total of 5.1 million jobs have disappeared.

Those who know that their unemployment aid is about to run out are counting the days, taking on odd jobs, moving in with relatives and fretting about the future.

"My biggest fear is we'll lose the house," said Hernan Alvarez, 54, an Orlando, Fla., construction worker who lost his job in July and whose benefits will end in four weeks. "The only thing I can do is keep looking for work and hope tomorrow will be better than today."

That so many people have remained on jobless aid for more than a year underscores the depth and duration of the recession, which began in December 2007. If the downturn extends into May, it will be the longest recession since the Great Depression.

Problem could get worse
The jobs crisis it has created has proved worse than most economists forecast — not to mention what lawmakers expected when they extended jobless benefits last year.

In March, nearly a quarter of the unemployed had been without work for six months or more, the highest proportion since the 1981-82 recession.

And the problem will probably get even worse. Employers typically remain reluctant to hire even months after a recession has officially ended. In the 1990-91 and 2001 recessions, the jobless rate peaked more than a year after the recovery began.

"What comes next, I'm afraid, will be the mother of all jobless recoveries," said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group, a consulting firm. "While we may emerge from recession from a statistical standpoint later this year, most Americans will be hard-pressed to tell the difference between a recession and a recovery the next 12 months."

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John Ensign on Hardball still blaming Fannie and Freddie and the Community Reinvestment Act for the economic crisis and claiming that government spending didn't get us out of the depression. I think Ensign and his buddy Boehner need to spend a little less time in the tanning bed thinking of new ways to attempt to revise history and take cheap political shots at entities they don't like and a little more time actually trying to get this country back on track and out of the mess we're in.

Leo T. Crowley (1889-1972) was the second Chairman of the FDR formed Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)). Prior to FDR there was no FDIC - you and your bank were on tenuous ground, and if the bank failed well . . . . .best of luck/don't forget to write if you get work/shut the door on your way out - simple as that.

But Wall Street, the collapse of the banking system and the Depression managed to change all that. And the FDIC came into existence within the first hundred days of the Roosevelt Administration.

As part of a "Meet Your Government" radio series, Crowley gives a little talk/interview in 1939.

Now to be fair, history is not always exciting and cliff-hanging and explosive. It is sometimes, well . . . dull as dirt. BUT it's important to get an idea who some of the players were in the events that more or less changed the course of history. Crowley wasn't a dynamic or emotional speaker. One could say that his vocal approach could be a good cure for insomnia. But it's the words and the ideas that count. And I promise I'll do something a little more high-voltage shortly!

"Creation of the National Banking System, establishment of the Federal Reserve System and similar measures, were all enacted in the interest of safety and stability.

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The person who's the point person for the wingnuts on the "FDR's actions made the Great Depression worse" meme actually has an op-ed piece in today's Washington Post. (I know you're shocked!)

The former member of the Wall St. Journal's editorial board (a body known for free-market, fantasy-based editorials that openly contradict their reporters' own fact-based stories) is flogging her book on said topic, and says some pretty wacky things about how we should handle the Current Economic Unpleasantness:

What about spending? The Depression tells us that public works are probably less effective than improving the environment for entrepreneurs and new companies. The president has already put forward a big tax cut for lower earners. He might offer a commensurate one for higher earners. He might expand the tax advantages he is currently offering to companies -- wider expensing of losses, for example -- and make them permanent. A discussion that permits the word "trillion" might also include the possibility of bringing down U.S. corporate taxes, taxes on interest, dividend and capital gains -- again, permanently. The cash that a relatively competitive United States draws from abroad will move the country forward faster than any stimulus.

So the Depression and the New Deal are both worth going back to, but for different reasons than many suspect. We may rely on the best of the New Deal, the matter-of-fact bravery our parents and grandparents showed then, to help us through today's unexpected challenges. But we don't have to repeat New Deal stimulus experiments, because we know that they didn't work.

You can read the mandatory rebuttal from Paul "Unlike Right-Wing Hacks, I Actually Won A Nobel Prize for Economics" Krugman here (I know, it's silly and old-fashioned of me to think Krugman might actually know more about the subject matter):

Net stimulus of around 3 percent of GDP — not much, when you’ve got a 42 percent output gap. FDR might have been more of a Keynesian if Keynesian economics had existed — The General Theory wasn’t published until 1936. Note in particular that in 1937-38 FDR was persuaded to do the “responsible” thing and cut back — and that’s what led to the bad year in 1938, which to the WSJ crowd defines the New Deal.

Implications for Obama: be inspired by FDR, but don’t imitate him slavishly. In particular, your economic policy should be bolder, not more cautious.

He also addresses her directly:

When you hear claims that the New Deal made the depression worse, they often come directly or indirectly from the work of Amity Shlaes, whose misleading statistics have been widely disseminated on the right.

(Oh, and he kneecaps her here, too.)

Historian Eric Rauchway:

So on the numbers, the U.S. economy improved briskly during the New Deal. Things that are moving quickly and in the right direction, but still haven't reached their destination after a while, are things that have a long way to go—which is true of the U.S. economy recovering from 1932. Historians disagree on which part of the New Deal most encouraged economic growth, but at the least the New Deal did not prevent this recovery.

Shlaes makes a different argument about numbers, because she uses different numbers. She starts each chapter with a rat-a-tat of just-the-facts, but instead of GDP, which represents the overall economy, she quotes the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which represents the maybe 10 percent of Americans who owned stock. And though she quotes an unemployment number, she doesn't quote the figures I've just mentioned. Instead she chooses different estimates of unemployment that (she acknowledges) show a much larger share of Americans out of work during the New Deal.

If you want to know how the New Deal treated ordinary Americans, this choice really matters. Let's look at a figure Shlaes gives twice in her book and again in her Wall Street Journal editorial: She has unemployment at 20 percent in the 1937-38 recession. That's appalling—almost as bad as 23 percent in 1932. Based on such a statistic, you could think the New Deal wasn't alleviating the Great Depression. But that number hides something: A third of the people Shlaes counts as unemployed had a job that the New Deal gave them through its relief programs.

Now, you may say, wait: Those people really shouldn't count as employed—we're not interested in government make-work, we're interested in the real economy. Fair enough—and if you look again at Historical Statistics of the United States, you'll see another measure of unemployment—private, nonfarm unemployment—measuring the real, industrial economy. And on that measure, unemployment again runs markedly lower under Roosevelt than under Hoover. John Maynard Keynes might have explained that the New Deal wasn't just offering make-work, it was stimulating the economy—and Shlaes in fact at one point says the same: "[I]t functioned as Keynes ... hoped it would." Yet of all the possible ways to measure unemployment, Shlaes chooses the only way that hides the effect of New Deal relief programs and makes it look as though the economy performed as poorly under Roosevelt as under Hoover.

She's equally intellectually rigorous in the rest of her public statements:

The private sector is a better job creator than the public sector. The Internet was not created by executive order — it was private industry.

I mean, come on - that's one's so widely known, most reasonably bright high school students would know that the federal government actually created the basis of what is now known as the internet.

And finally, Ms. Shlaes puffs up her own academic credentials (she doesn't even know the definition of a recession)- because, you know, she's a right-wing hack pushing an agenda, and not someone who's learned to achieve within the academically-rigorous free market of ideas (you know, the one not propped up financially by free-market foundations). I'm not surprised to find out that she's an English major with no formal training in history or economics! I mean, neither do I - but I haven't set myself up as an economic expert, either.

Don't write her off, or ignore the possible impact she may have on the stimulus package. After all, you know how people believe what they see on the teevee, and she's all over the place in our fair-and-balanced media.

I wonder what Obama is going to do for laid-off workers who weren't employed long enough to be eligible for unemployment. That's a big - and rarely discussed - problem:

More than 11 million American workers -- roughly 1 out of 14 -- are unemployed and actively looking for new jobs, according to the Labor Department. An additional 8 million are working part time even though they want full-time work, and 1.9 million were out of work and either too discouraged to keep looking or had refocused on school or caring for family.

"Factoring in discouraged workers, unemployment is closer to 9.4%," said Peter Morici, an economist at the University of Maryland. "Add workers in part-time positions that cannot find full-time employment and the hidden unemployment rate is 14.5%."

The stock market had braced for bad news, so the reaction was relatively muted compared with the dramatic swings of last autumn. The Dow Jones industrial average closed down 143.28 points, or 1.6%, to 8,599.18.

The last time the unemployment rate topped 7% was in 1993. In nominal terms, the economy has lost more jobs this year than in any year since 1945, although the population has grown significantly.

Still, economists generally expect this recession, which began in December 2007, to be the longest since the Great Depression. The two longest recessions of the postwar era -- 1973-75 and 1982-83 -- each lasted 16 months. (The deepest quarterly contraction of the postwar era was a 10.4% decline in gross domestic product in the fourth quarter of 1958.)

The unemployment rate is still far from the levels of the Great Depression, when more than 20% of American workers lost their jobs, as well as of the shorter but deep recession of the early 1980s, when unemployment reached 10.8% in 1982.

The report was full of ill portents nonetheless. For one thing, the average number of weekly hours worked dropped to 33.3 per worker. That's the lowest number since the Labor Department began keeping track in 1964. Businesses tend to cut hours before cutting workers, suggesting that more layoffs are pending.

"We're seeing a complete unraveling of the labor market and are on track for getting beyond 10% unemployment," said Lawrence Mishel, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

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From The Cafferty File Dec. 4, 2008:

A top executive at Chrysler, Vice Chairman Jim Press, is warning that the failure of just one of the Big Three automakers could drive the U.S. economy into a depression.

The CEOs of Chrysler, Ford and GM were back on Capitol Hill today asking for $34 billion in aid, just two weeks after they asked for $25 billion and were shot down.

Ford CEO Alan Mulally quoted an estimate from Goldman Sachs during his testimony that said the failures of the three companies could cost the U.S. economy up to $1 trillion.

Sure the companies need cash. And sure they directly provide jobs to 355,000 workers. And an additional 4.5 million jobs in related industries. But there are real questions about whether we would be throwing good money after bad. Detroit has failed to keep up with a changing industry for years, despite the handwriting that was clearly put on the wall by Toyota and Honda, among others. American cars come with legacy costs unrivaled anywhere in the industry. Sales figures released this week were terrible. GM down 41 percent, Ford down 31 percent. Congress is grappling with whether the cure is worse than the disease.

Here’s my question to you: Will the loss of any one of the Big Three auto companies lead to a depression?

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