And the news on the labor front is not good. Official unemployment hit 10.2% in October. If we throw in discouraged and part-time workers who want full time jobs, we're looking at 17.5%. Top that off with the 2.3 million people we have stuffed into jails and prisons, and we've got about 19% of our working age population not living up to their "productive potential." Long-term unemployment is approaching frightening levels, and Congress just had to extend jobless benefits yet again. You get the idea. I don't want to horn in on my next posting too much, so I'll leave it at that.

So what are the responses we're getting from our national leaders as our economy melts away into the thirsty sands of hopelessness? Unfortunately, it's hard to teach old dogs (Blue or otherwise) new tricks, so we've been treated to healthy dollops of ideology-as-usual, albeit with some Tea Party-type variations. In effect, both Democrats and Republicans are doubling down on their traditional narratives, even as these stories become more unhinged from conditions on the ground. And this is a dangerous place to be.

Let's take the floundering Obama administration and the Democratic congressional leadership first. Before jetting off to Asia for a week, the President issued a short statement on "The Economy" (speech from 11/12). In his profound wisdom, he noted that "hiring often takes time to catch up to economic growth. And given the magnitude of the economic turmoil that we've experienced, employers are reluctant to hire." So luckily, we're going to have an awesome forum at the White House in December, with CEOs, small business owners, economists, financial experts, labor union reps, and nonprofit groups getting together to talk about how to "get this economy moving again." Fantastic! Great news!

But wait, why do we need to have a forum at all, if jobs are just a lagging indicator, as Obama referenced earlier in the same statement? (See my earlier post on the subject of lagging indicators). In the mainstream, pro-growth model of the Democrats, the stock market itself is the main indicator of economic health, and we all know that the "recovery" has already begun on Wall Street. So what's the problem? Why have a forum? Just keep reassuring the American people that they'll get their jobs back, eventually. Until then, just hold tight and wait for "the economy" to fix everything out of its own self-propelled momentum (nudged along, or course, by the velvet fiscal cattle prod of the federal government, via stimulus and re-regulation and the like).

In this technocratic, business-friendly world of Obama and the Democrats, there is no consideration that we may have crossed several ecological and civilizational Rubicons in the last several decades, rendering the tidy, Economic Growth is Our Friend myth completely obsolete. As natural systems crash all around us, and the macro-ratios between technology and labor come completely unraveled, and old patterns of private ownership of land and resources prove utterly unable to craft sensible living and working arrangements for the future, the breezy optimism and fiscal recklessness of the Democrats is scarily oblivious. 

This Democratic tone-deafness is especially visible in the two arenas of health care reform and the continuing wars in Mesopotamia. Now, I'm sure that many of the Dems' intentions are good with the whole health care thing. But the simple fact is that the United States spends two to three times per person on health care than almost every other industrialized nation. And our results are worse, both in health statistics themselves, and in the economic havoc that the system wreaks on individuals and families (see my earlier posts on health care here and here). The approach that the Congress and the Obama administration are taking is that we can craft an unruly, bloated, complicated, overly-bureaucratic health care system that continues to reward the business community, but can still save money through fancy new panels and insurance bazaars and the like. Everybody wins. But many of the proposed reforms don't even kick in for another couple years. They are acting as if they really believe that we have the time to enact these sprawling changes, as if we're not on the brink of utter societal meltdown. Hell, who knows? By the time these reforms kick in, maybe those pesky lagging indicator job problems will already be fixed, so this health care stuff will all be gravy anyway.

Even worse is the situation in the Middle East. We continue to pour our blood and treasure into the bottomless troughs of Islamic dysfunction, nation-building our way into a second decade of murder and terror. Again, Obama is acting as if we will continue to have the financial means to fund these follies. He's even going to escalate our troop presence in Afghanistan. Not much more needs to be said on these occupations. They are wrong, they cannot achieve what we want them to, and we need to get out of both countries, completely. If the world views our withdrawal as a "loss," so be it. In case people haven't noticed, the current recession is global, and the cratering fortunes of almost all nations are going to take precedence over any possible celebrations over American failure in the Middle East. Countries have to hunker down and get their own houses in order, especially us. Flushing money down the toilet to fulfill imperial dreams of mastery over all extremism is a luxury we cannot afford.

Okay, enough Democratic skewering. On to the GOP. Just as mainstream liberals and progressives are pinning their hopes on a business-driven recovery that will not deliver what they wish for, conservatives have pushed all of their chips in on the culture wars and the Reagan rhetoric of government being the problem, not the solution. Millions of gallons of digital and old-timey ink have already been spilled on the Tea Party crowd and the Birthers, so I won't belabor that. There is really nothing new in these protests anyway. It's the same misdirected rage towards a nebulous "liberal elite" that we've seen since Nixon and Goldwater, and it has already been perfectly dissected and dismantled by Thomas Frank in "What's the Matter with Kansas?" (check out Frank's work at his website, http://tcfrank.com/). Conservatives are forever forgetting that Big Business literally owns both parties, and that Big Military is also a part of the woefully inefficient Big Gub'mint. 

So while those "grassroots" Birther and Tea Party events are somewhat interesting, the more disturbing facet is that the Republican establishment seems content to let these streams of discontent flow to wherever they will. The GOP leadership senses that the massive scope of our economic collapse spells doom for the Dems in the mid-terms, and will likely make Obama the most celebrated one-termer since JFK. So why play ball and risk the possibility of being dragged down with the sinking ship? Better to obstruct and shout loudly about the overreach and arrogance of Obama, while sobbing melodramatically about our great nation being spent into Socialism and debt-slavery for generations. 

This is a bold but dangerous gamble. Just as the Dems are unfounded in thinking that a recovering stock market means that trillions can be wasted on wars and pseudo-reforms of our health industries, the GOP is on shaky ground in thinking that they can sit by and fan the flames of populist rage and still have anything resembling a civilized society to rescue in 2010 and 2012. Now, I'm not saying that the United States will descend into barbarous chaos in the next year or two if the GOP doesn't sign on to some phony-baloney legislation that they don't believe in. Principled non-participation and even obstruction is the right of every member of Congress, and the filibuster is on the books as a valid tool, so it should be used without shame as needed. But by piling on with the alarmist socialist bullshit, the Republican leadership is foreclosing the possibility of there being any kind of rational discussion about the major challenges facing our nation and our planet: Peak Oil, ecosystem collapse, systemic technological unemployment, etc. In a way, the GOP is being just as naively optimistic about our current difficulties, supposing that they can piggy-back off of the seething public as they did all through the 80s and 90s, and still be able to reign in the potential violence or extremism that can be unleashed. 

Next time, we'll look at the grim but ultimately hopeful specter that hangs over the horizon: the permanent devaluation of human labor as it relates to economic productivity. Have we reached "The End of Work," as Jeremy Rifkin called it way back in 1994?