An Economy on the Rebound

When President Barack Obama took the oath of office on January 20, 2009, the U.S. economy was in free fall. During the preceding year and half, some of the nation’s largest and most important financial institutions went bankrupt, including Bear Stearns, Countrywide, and Lehman Brothers, as risky loans and other investments failed. Many other large banks were on the verge of collapse. The downfall of the financial sector had been preceded by a spectacular end to a massive speculative housing bubble that almost instantly wiped out trillions of dollars of Americans’ net worth. When Lehman Brothers and AIG went into bankruptcy during the same weekend in September 2008, panic ensued all across the economy. It felt like 1929 all over again. The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which was signed into law by President George W. Bush and was implemented by President Obama, stopped the bleeding in the financial sector, but the damage to the broader economy had already been done as other sectors of the economy continued to rapidly deteriorate. The stock markets plummeted, losing more than half of their peak market capitalization just six weeks after Obama took office. Many retirees and workers nearing retirement saw their investment portfolio lose much of its value. Millions of people lost their jobs due to no fault of their own after the U.S. entered a recession in December 2007. Over 1.2 million Americans were laid off between the election and Obama’s inauguration. All told, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 8.7 million jobs were lost due to the Great Recession. No president since Franklin D. Roosevelt has begun their tenure in the White House under such dire circumstances. An evaluation of each segment of the economy around the time Obama took office compared to now shows that we are definitely better off four years later.

Does Romney Believe Laziness Causing High Unemployment?

Remarks that Mitt Romney made to wealthy donors back in May 2012, have put Romney in an awkward position. Romney denigrated nearly half of the population of the U.S. and erroneously claimed that Obama supporters were all dependent on government assistance. After receiving a question about how Romney would be able to win the election, Romney remarked:

Illegals Offer Their Jobs Back to Real Americans

I'm sure we've all heard conservatives lament about how illegal immigrants are stealing American jobs. Well here is an incredible opportunity for real Americans to take back the jobs illegals have taken from us. According to United Farm Workers, a labor union for agricultural laborers, over 50% of farm laborers in the US are undocumented (a.k.a. illegal) immigrants. The UFA has created a website devoted to helping legal Americans find work in the agriculture sector as laborers. So please tell all of your unemployed family members and friends to visit this website so they can take back an American job from an illegal immigrant.

The website is not a joke. Here is the UFA's statement on the issue:

There are two issues facing our nation--high unemployment and undocumented people in the workforce--that many Americans believe are related.

Missing from the debate on both issues is an honest recognition that the food we all eat - at home, in restaurants and workplace cafeterias (including those in the Capitol) - comes to us from the labor of undocumented farm workers.

Agriculture in the United States is dependent on an immigrant workforce. Three-quarters of all crop workers working in American agriculture were born outside the United States. According to government statistics, since the late 1990s, at least 50% of the crop workers have not been authorized to work legally in the United States.

We are a nation in denial about our food supply. As a result the UFW has initiated the "Take Our Jobs" campaign.

Farm workers are ready to welcome citizens and legal residents who wish to replace them in the field. We will use our knowledge and staff to help connect the unemployed with farm employers. Just fill out the form to the right and continue on to the request for job application.

Pregnant Rape Victims Should Turn Lemons into Lemonade- Sharron Angle

Tea Party extraordinaire and Nevada Republican candidate for US Senate Sharron Angle recently told a reporter that she thinks teenage rape victims should make "a lemon situation into lemonade" by carrying their pregnancies to term. This radical does not think that there should be a legal abortion exception for rape or incest. Instead, she thinks these situations should be left solely to Divine Providence.

Questioner: What do you say then to a young girl... when a young girl is raped by her father, let's say, and she is pregnant. How do you explain this to her in terms of wanting her to go through the process of having the baby?

Angle: I think that two wrongs don't make a right. And I have been in the situation of counseling young girls, not 13 but 15, who have had very at risk, difficult pregnancies. And my counsel was to look for some alternatives, which they did. And they found that they had made what was really a lemon situation into lemonade.

Her interview with radio talk show host Bill Manders goes even further:



I can respect someone's view when they feel that the government should prevent elective abortions (though I may not agree with it- as I stated in my Culture of Life posts, I am neither Pro-Choice, nor Pro-Life as I have not completely decided my view of the government's role in regulating elective abortion). But to say that a girl who has been raped by her father cannot have the option to an abortion, that the government and society will compel that girl to carry her pregnancy to term, is truly cruel and unusual punishment. (Of course a pregnancy resulting from a rape should not automatically result in an abortion. The point is that especially in such a scenario, the decision should lie with the victim, not with the government.) Sharon Angle is nut to espouse such a view. But I'm grateful she's being honest about what she believes. A simple examination of some of her public statements shows she is absolutely a far right-wing radical. She's in favor of abolishing Social Security. She recently said that the unemployed were "spoiled," and that as senator, she would do nothing to help with unemployment.



The good news is that Sen. Harry Reid is now leading in the polls, because of a recent focus on Angle's extreme policy positions.