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.

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Big thanks to Shoq for tipping me off to this segment.

It's hard to cogitate when you're immersed in the cesspool that passes for political debate nowadays that this country has actually seen worse days than this. Our economy has been worse, unemployment was higher and journalism was just as yellow.

But as documentarian Ken Burns points out, we also had a president who was willing to invest in our country, to invest in American "shovel-ready" jobs and put them to work developing our beautiful national park system. And as a result, we all share in the beauty of Yosemite and the Grand Canyon as well as the historical significance of sites Monroe Elementary and Manzanar, which do not necessarily reflect a time where America is at its best.

Burns does a great job of smacking down the GOP's completely nonsensical cries of "Socialism!" and reminds us of how tragic it would be if those in Washington had been so similarly cowed during Roosevelt's day, instead of understanding that the creation of the National Parks system brought Americans together, made these areas accessible and available to every American, thereby democratizing our very best idea.

I can't think of a state less equipped to deal with major health insurance rate hikes than Michigan, currently mired with - this will not be a typo - 15.6% unemployment. But that's exactly what they're getting.

In the past few days, 114,000 Michigan households have received bad-news letters from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, socking individual health insurance subscribers with premium increases averaging 22%, effective Oct. 1.

Blue Cross could have said, "Hey, things could have been worse. We asked for a 56% rate hike first and dialed it back to 22%" -- but that probably would have just made folks angrier.

Instead, the Blue Cross letters simply stated, "We know every Michigan resident faces financial challenges, and we thank you for your business and loyalty to the Blues."

The two numbers, unemployment and rate hikes, have a correlation. Individual insurance has expanded by 96% at Blue Cross of Michigan in the past two years. That's because they act like a non-profit state "co-op" would in a private sector allowed to discriminate against their customers:

In just the past two years, the number of under-65 individual subscribers has grown by 59,000, or 96%, at Blue Cross, the nonprofit "insurer of last resort" in Michigan. Private for-profit insurers tend to cherry-pick younger, healthier consumers, driving older and less-healthy people to Blue Cross if they have no employer-provided group coverage.

State law requires Blue Cross to offer insurance to anyone, but it also demands that the company not lose money on its insurance products. Therein lies the rub: Blue Cross lost $133 million last year on individual subscribers.

This is that "perfect market" that conservatives like to talk about. Given the ability to discriminate over its customers, private insurers dump the sick on to Blue Cross. And because the state requires Blue Cross to break even, they must raise their premiums basically at the rate of the cost of health inflation year-over-year, often on the poorest and most vulnerable members of society.

Michigan is not the only state seeing large rate hikes in its health insurance market. Oregon small businesses are seeing double-digit rate increases this year. In California, policies have gone up 9% since 2007, three times higher than the overall cost of living. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Rhode Island has proposed a 16% rate hike, with UnitedHealth of New England up 11.6%. Washington state consumers will see large increases as well. Overall, increases by double digits are expected nationwide.

We hear from conservatives that businesses may drop their plans under health insurance reform. Actually, that's virtually assured if nothing is done. Companies, especially small businesses, will have no chance keeping up with these ever-increasing rates and hope to compete in the global marketplace. And ultimately, those businesses who do pay for these rate hikes do so out of potential wage increases for their employees. Wage growth stagnates and people wind up with less disposable income. The money funneled to health insurance companies could be used to reverse the recession and pull us into economic recovery. In this sense, insurance companies are acting like a siphon, reducing the fuel that can be used to drive the engine of growth.

And that siphon will take more and more money out of your pocket, unless we do something now.

As always, Thom Hartmann makes a lot of sense:

One of the most powerful forms of stimulus we could apply to our economy right now would be to lower the current Social Security retirement age from the current 65-67 to 55, and increase the benefits back to where they were in inflation-adjusted 1960s dollars by raising them between 10 to 20 percent (so people could actually live, albeit modestly, on Social Security).

The right-wing reaction to this, of course, will be to say that with fewer people working and more people drawing benefits, it would bankrupt Social Security and destroy the economy. But history shows the exact reverse.

Instead, it would eliminate the problem of unemployment in the United States. All those Boomers retiring would make room in the labor market for all the recent high-school and college graduates who are now finding it so hard to find a job.

Hartmann goes on in the article to discuss in detail about how lowering the retirement age would open up thousands of jobs nationwide, and how wages for working class Americans have been devastated since the days of Ronald Reagan and our old pal Alan Greenspan started gutting unions and trying to lower our standard of living:

In September of 2007, in an interview on C-SPAN for Book TV, Greenspan said: “We pay the highest skilled labor wages in the world. If we would open up our borders to skilled labor far more than we do, we would attract a very substantial quantity of skilled labor which would suppress the wage levels of the skilled, because the skilled are essentially being subsidized by the government, meaning our competition is being kept outside the country.”

It’s shocking that ideologues like Greenspan, Reagan, and Clinton believe this, but they do. And the only way to reverse the past 29 years of Reaganomics/Clintonomics is to tighten up the labor market again. While a great start would be to pull out of our insane trade treaties and begin again protecting American manufacturers, that will take a decade for the impact to be truly felt even if we were to go back to our 1980 tariff levels today. Read on...

Thom finishes by stating that his plan would ultimately "take us to nearly zero unemployment and dramatically stimulate the economy." I happen to think it's a good idea. What say you?

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David Brooks as usual, is wrong on just about almost everything that comes out of his mouth in this segment. Health care reform is popular. This mess that looks like it's going to be a sell out to the insurance industries is losing popularity. Obama's numbers are going down among his base and with independents as this thing plays itself out and it appears that not only was single-payer not on the table, but the public option wasn't either. It's not losing popularity because the President didn't look like he showed enough love to the Grassley's and Blue Dogs of the world.

And the democratic process has not made Chuck Grassley do anything. Chuck Grassley is out to destroy the chances of anything meaningful being done with reforming our current system, and listening to his constituents at town halls has not changed that one way or the other.

From The Newshour with Jim Lehrer Aug. 21, 2009.

JIM LEHRER: What would you add to that or subtract?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I'm not sure it was inevitable.

JIM LEHRER: You don't think it was inevitable?

DAVID BROOKS: No, I mean, he's lost the independents, a group I don't think he had to lose. If he had taken a stimulus package of $400 billion instead of $787 billion, I think he would have held the independents, held a lot of the Republicans.

If he had taken sort of a more moderate version of health care reform, I think he could have held on to -- there's a Wyden-Bennett plan that he, I think, would have held on to some of those independents.

I mean, the major reason he's falling down now -- the secondary reason is the economy is still not -- you know, unemployment. But the major reason is health care reform. His major domestic initiative is unpopular. The majority -- a slight majority of the American people disapprove of it, and there's no sign that that's let up.

And so he really is in a sort of not freefall, but a serious slide. You know, Charlie Cook, who knows more about congressional elections than just about anybody, has a memo out today saying there's as much of a chance the Democrats will lose more than 20 seats in the next House elections than fewer than 20 seats, and that's a pretty serious thing. That's a terrible climate in which to try to enact health care.

Continue reading »

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Digby took note of this segment on Hardball, and I agree with her assessment about what it would mean for the President if he lost some Blue Dog Democrats in the mid-term election.

I would love to hear anyone tell me why I shouldn't be cheering for that outcome.

Cook said it would "reflect on" the president, but from my perspective it would reflect well on him. And if it happens because he rammed through meaningful health care reform instead of some watered down bucket of warm spit and the administration managed to get unemployment down, I think he will very likely have Morning in America in 2012.

To hell with Rahm and his appease the Blue Dogs at all costs strategy. What good is it if the president fails in 2012? If Cook is right and the Dems maintain their majority while losing a bunch of these reactionary wingnuts, I couldn't be happier. And the Democrat should be happy too because it means they can pass successful legislation for a change.

It wouldn't break my heart either. These Blue Dogs and Liebercrats do nothing but vote against the President anyway, and they give the media an excuse to bring them on to undermine the progressives in the party.

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Rep. Mike Pence disagrees with the stimulus and voted against it but wants more of it for his state. "The Democrats in Congress and the administration said we were going to have to borrow nearly a trillion dollars from future generations and spend it on this -- this long laundry list of liberal spending priorities we called stimulus and that unless we did that, unemployment would reach 8% nationally. It's 9.5% nationally today," Pence told Fox News' Chris Wallace.

But Pence charges that Indiana isn't getting enough money from the very program that he doesn't support. "You check the Indiana Star, you'll see stories about the stimulus. One is that four out of ten major projects in the stimulus for Indiana had been allotted to companies outside the state of Indiana," complained Pence.

Transcript below the fold.

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It's nice to know that as Americans struggle with unemployment and lack of health insurance, at least one worthy group of lads are doing well!

American International Group is preparing to pay millions of dollars more in bonuses to several dozen top corporate executives after an earlier round of payments four months ago set off a national furor.

The troubled insurance giant has been pressing the federal government to bless the payments in hopes of shielding itself from renewed public outrage.

Uh, hon? We don't care if the Pope himself blesses you. We're not going to be happy about this. Nope.

The request puts the administration's new compensation czar on the spot by seeking his opinion about bonuses that were promised long before he took his post.

AIG doesn't actually need the permission of Kenneth R. Feinberg, who President Obama appointed last month to oversee the compensation of top executives at seven firms that have received large federal bailouts. But officials at AIG, whose federal rescue package stands at $180 billion, have been reluctant to move forward without political cover from the government.

"Anytime we write a check to anybody" it is highly scrutinized, said an AIG official, who declined to speak on the record because the negotiations with Feinberg are ongoing. "We would want to feel comfortable that the government is comfortable with what we are doing."

I don't know about you, but I'm not feeling all that comfortable with this.

The payments coming due next week include $2.4 million in bonuses for about 40 high-ranking executives at AIG, according to administration documents from earlier this year. Though the actual sum may have changed since then, the payments are much smaller than those that caused the upheaval in March.

To those of us who are lucky enough that they're still employed, I'll bet they're thinking about that past ten years of one- and two-percent raises, wondering how to get on that magical merry-go-round. Dream on!

I used to be an executive recruiter and I can tell you: the worse a recession is, the more demanding the prospective employers become. I remember trying to fill high-level software sales positions after the dot com collapse for hiring managers who didn't want "any of those dot com people." (Apparently they showed too great an affinity for risk-taking.) And yet, all the experienced candidates worked for them, so they ended up hiring people who didn't know what they were doing.

So if you're a good, talented employee and you still have trouble getting a job, please don't take it personally. The people making the hiring decisions are often a little nuts, making off-the-wall demands based on their own crazy logic:

With unemployment at 9.4% and rising, it’s a buyer’s market for employers that are hiring. But many employers are bypassing the jobless to target those still working, reasoning that these survivors are the top performers.

“If they’re employed in today’s economy, they have to be first string,” says Ryan Ross, a partner with Kaye/Bassman International Corp., an executive recruiting firm in Dallas. Mr. Ross says more clients recently have indicated that they would prefer to fill positions with “passive candidates” who are working elsewhere and not actively seeking a job.

See, that's just sales speak. It may indicate that they're first string - or it may indicate that their brother-in-law is the department head, or that the person is really, really good at kissing butt.

The whole "passive candidate" thing is something recruiters like to push because that way, we get to bill a lot more hours. After all, it takes a lot longer than just searching the Monster resume file!

The bias extends from front-line workers to senior managers. Charlie Wilgus, managing partner of executive search for Lucas Group, based in Atlanta, says a manufacturing client looking for a division president recently refused to consider a former divisional president at Newell Rubbermaid Inc. whose department had been eliminated. The client doesn’t want candidates who have been laid off, Mr. Wilgus says.

Bobby Fitzgerald prefers to hire the already employed even though he gets two dozen or more unsolicited résumés each day at his White Chocolate Grill.

Employers’ preference for the employed adds another hurdle for those who have been laid off. Job seekers frequently are competing with dozens of other applicants for the few available positions.

Bobby Fitzgerald, a partner in five restaurants in three states, says these days he gets two dozen or more unsolicited résumés each day at one of his Phoenix restaurants, the White Chocolate Grill. But Mr. Fitzgerald says his top candidates, for jobs ranging from servers to management, usually are people who are employed elsewhere. He currently has 50 openings across his five restaurants and has told recruiters to bring in only people who are working.

Yes, the "unemployed" stigma is another huge hurdle. No matter how carefully you'd explain that a candidate was really top-notch, and that the circumstances surrounding their unemployment had nothing to do with them, employers just didn't want to hear it. (Oh, and they didn't want anyone who was older. We ignored that - and if they pushed, told them we didn't use illegal practices.)

I've tried to talk to these people. I'd say, "Look, if you hire some superstar away from another company, what you've hired is someone who's really in demand and will always be ready to leave you for a better offer. It's better to hire a good solid performer who will be loyal because you gave him a break." (Occasionally they would listen.)

The other annoying thing that happens during a recession is that employers start demanding all sorts of unrelated skill sets in one person (figuring they'll get them to do two jobs for the price of one). I'd advise you against taking a job like that even if it's offered - no matter how bad the economy is, it's not worth the heart attack you'll probably get.

Now, as a recruiter, I would never advise a candidate to do anything unethical or misleading. But as a human being, I can tell you: Remove any dates on your resume that indicate your age. Don't list every job you ever had, it only makes you look old. And don't put down "consultant" as your present employment (unless you work for a known consulting company) because most people will assume that means unemployed.

But if you're doing any part-time consulting for anyone, see if they'll agree to say you're working full-time, and list that job title instead. Do what you can to make it look like you're already employed.

It's a jungle out there, guys.

Digby points out the obvious class system that's firmly in place for health care. There are so many exceptions, so much denial of care, we really should start calling it "KatrinaCare." (h/t DCBlogger)

Other countries have systems that prioritize health care treatment on the basis of need --- a triage system. We prioritize health care on the basis of who can pay. And in the most perverse form of rationing there is, we make the sickest people have the most difficult time getting access to health care. (The sickest, after all, can't hold down a job, so the employer based system doesn't really work for them, at least not in the long term.)

And let's not forget: If you get sick while you're on unemployment, they can stop your benefits because you're no longer ready to work!

The idea that the US doesn't ration health care is absurd. We certainly do. We just make people do it to themselves out of economic hardship. I guess that's supposed to be a tribute to our sense of individualism and personal freedom.

Hey, nobody's going to tell you you can't be treated --- you made that decision all by yourself when you opted not to have a lot of money. That's what freedom's all about. (Unless you're sick and you want to die, of course, in which case the state won't let you.)

The debate is really about irrational rationing vs rational rationing -- and the US is the undisputed leader of the first method. When we set our minds to it, nobody can be as irrational as we are.