Recovery? What recovery?

Author's Note: Please take a few minutes and Join the Firedoglake Membership Program today. FDL provides the tools that help me and others extend our reach with our rants so we need to support FDL when we can.


This morning (Sunday, April 8) I was at the laundromat here in beautiful downtown Ruskin, FL and picked up a copy of the local, Tampa area Jobs Finder free newspaper. I'm sure most all of you have seen these free papers for your local area.

As I skimmed this paper, it reinforced for me that there is no economic recovery, at least not in this part of Florida. When I picked the paper up, I noticed it was awfully skinny so I counted pages. Eight whole pages. With large ads covering each page so I counted up all the ads. Thirty-nine ads for 8 pages. Then I looked even closer. Two ads were for the paper itself. Another two ads were for "start your own cleaning company" services. Then I counted nineteen ads for various types of training programs. Not for jobs. For for-profit training programs that might, maybe, if you can afford it and complete it, maybe get you a minimum wage job if you can survive to complete the six month to a year plus training program being offered.

No ads for local delivery drivers. No handyman type ads. No manual labor/construction service ads. No help wanted for local businesses and restaurants. No ads for jobs for any of the thousands of job types one usually sees in these types of free newspapers.

Now granted, this is obviously anecdotal but I would wager that in a lot of parts of the country, this is the current norm. It isn't much better with the ads on Craigslist or Monster or other online job search services. One of the metrics I use to check for job market improvements is the number of job ads from body shop/consulting services/head hunter agencies versus the number of ads from employers directly. My WAG is that the former ads are running nearly 10 to 1 over the latter. Businesses that are hiring directly are still able to be extremely picky about who they interview and hire.

But I guess we are not to worry. Everything must be getting better since the Beltway Village Idiots Pundits and Politicians seem to be in full pearl clutching mode after DNC Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz went on CNN this morning and accused the Republicans of rooting for the economy to fail. Oh the horror of it all. Too bad that it seems to be beneficial to both parties to have the economy in doldrums. They all seem to forget that the 25M to 30M long term un and underemployed are each and every one, living, breathing, feeling human beings and not just statistics on the page full of numbers

And because I can: